Blues for Europa

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Sahra Wagenknecht / Bundesparteitag (Photo: DIE LINKE)

The entry of a new German Left Party shakes up the Country
By Vijay Prashad (Posted Jan 26, 2024)

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

In October 2023, 10 members of the German parliament (Bundestag) left Die Linke (the Left) and declared their intention to form their own party. With their departure, Die Linke’s parliamentary group fell to 28 out of the 736 members of the Bundestag, compared to the 78 members of the far-right Alliance for Germany (AfD). One of the reasons for the departure of these 10 MPs is that they believe that Die Linke has lost touch with its working-class base, whose decomposition over issues of war and inflation has moved many of them into the arms of the AfD. The new formation is led by Sahra Wagenknecht (born 1969), one of the most dynamic politicians of her generation in Germany and a former star in Die Linke, and Amira Mohamed Ali. It is called the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance for Reason and Justice (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, BSW) and it launched in early January 2024.

Wagenknecht’s former comrades in Die Linke accuse her of “conservatism” because of her views on immigration in particular. As we will see, though, Wagenknecht contests this description of her approach. The description of “left-wing conservatism” (articulated by Dutch professor Cas Mudde) is frequently deployed, although not elaborated upon by her critics. I spoke to Wagenknecht and her close ally—Sevim Dağdelen—about their new party and their hopes to move a progressive agenda in Germany.

Anti-War
The heart of our conversation rested on the deep divide in Germany between a government—led by the Social Democrat Olaf Scholz—eager to continue the war in Ukraine, and a population that wants this war to end and for their government to tackle the severe crisis of inflation. The heart of the matter, said Wagenknecht and Dağdelen, is the attitude to the war. Die Linke, they argue, simply did not come out strongly against the Western backing of the war in Ukraine and did not articulate the despair in the population. “If you argue for the self-destructive economic warfare against Russia that is pushing millions of people in Germany into penury and causing an upward redistribution of wealth, then you cannot credibly stand up for social justice and social security,” Wagenknecht told me.

If you argue for irrational energy policies like bringing in Russian energy more expensively via India or Belgium, while campaigning not to reopen the pipelines with Russia for cheap energy, then people simply will not believe that you would stand up for the millions of employees whose jobs are in jeopardy as a result of the collapse of whole industries brought about by the rise in energy prices.

Scholz’s approval rating is now at 17 percent, and unless his government is able to solve the pressing problems engendered by the Ukraine war, it is unlikely that he will be able to reverse this image. Rather than try to push for a ceasefire and negotiations in Ukraine, Scholz’s coalition of the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Free Democrats, say Dağdelen, “is trying to commit the people of Germany to a global war alongside the United States on at least three fronts: in Ukraine, in East Asia with Taiwan, and in the Middle East at the side of Israel. It speaks volumes that Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock even prevented a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza at the Cairo summit” in October 2023.

Indeed, in 2022, Thuringia’s prime minister and a Die Linke leader, Bodo Ramelow, told Süddeutsche Zeitung that the German federal government must send tanks to Ukraine. When Wagenknecht called Gaza an “open-air prison” in October 2023, the Die Linke parliamentary group leader Dietmar Bartsch said that he “strongly distanced” himself from her (the phrase “open-air prison” to describe Gaza is used widely, including by Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967). “We have to point out what is happening here,” Dağdelen tells me,

It is our duty to organize resistance to this collapse of Die Linke’s anti-war stance. We reject Germany’s involvement in the U.S. and NATO proxy wars in Ukraine, East Asia, and the Middle East.

Controversies
On February 25, 2023, Wagenknecht and her followers organized an anti-war protest at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin that drew 30,000 people. The protest followed the publication of a “peace manifesto,” written by Wagenknecht and the feminist writer Alice Schwarzer, which has now attracted over a million signatures. The Washington Post reported on this rally with an article headlined, “Kremlin tries to build antiwar coalition in Germany.” Dağdelen tells me that the bulk of those who attended the rally and those who signed the manifesto are from the “centrist, liberal, and left-wing camps.” A well-known extreme right-wing journalist, Jürgen Elsässer tried to take part in the demonstration, but Dağdelen—as video footage shows—argued with him and told him to leave. Everyone but the right-wing, she says, was welcome at the rally. However, both Dağdelen and Wagenknecht say their former party—Die Linke—tried to obstruct the rally and demonized them for holding it. “The defamation is intended to construct an enemy within,” Dağdelen told me.

Vilifying peace protests is intended to put people off and simultaneously mobilize support for repugnant government policies, such as arms supply to Ukraine.

Part of the controversy around Wagenknecht is about her views on immigration. Wagenknecht says that she supports the right to political asylum and says that people fleeing war must be afforded protection. But, she argues, the problem of global poverty cannot be solved by migration, but by sound economic policies and an end to the sanctions on countries like Syria. A genuine left-wing, she says, must attend to the alarm call from communities who call for an end to immigration and move to the far-right AfD. “Unlike the leadership of Die Linke,” Wagenknecht told me,

we do not intend to write off AfD voters and simply watch as the right-wing threat in Germany continues to grow. We want to win back those AfD voters who have gone to that party out of frustration and in protest at the lack of a real opposition that speaks for communities.

The point of her politics, Wagenknecht said, is not anti-immigration as much as it is to attack the AfD’s anti-immigrant stand at the same time as her party will work with the communities to understand why they are frustrated and how their frustration against immigrants is often a wider frustration with cuts in social welfare, cuts in education and health funding, and in a cavalier policy toward economic migration. “It is revealing,” she said, “that the harshest attacks on us come from the far-right wing.” They do not want, she points out, the new party to shift the argument away from a narrow anti-immigrant focus to pro-working-class politics.

Polls show that the new party could win 14 percent of the vote, which would be three times the Die Linke share and would make BSW the third-largest party in the Bundestag.

https://mronline.org/2024/01/26/the-ent ... e-country/


Germany’s support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza has caused huge anger. (Photo: Michael Kuenne ZUMA Press)

Germany backs Netanyahu for the same reason it created Hitler
By Paweł Wargan (Posted Jan 26, 2024)

Originally published: The Electronic Intifada on January 24, 2024 (more by The Electronic Intifada) |

On 12 January, the day commemorating the 1904 revolt of the Herero people against German colonialism, Olaf Scholz’s government announced that it would intervene in the International Court of Justice to oppose South Africa’s charge of genocide against Israel. The move sparked widespread indignation.

The following day, the Namibian presidency published a forceful statement condemning the decision.

“On Namibian soil, Germany committed the first genocide of the 20th century,” the statement said.

In light of Germany’s inability to draw lessons from its horrific history, President Hage G. Geingob expresses deep concern with the shocking decision.

It is worth dwelling on the word “inability.” Many who condemned Germany’s decision accused it of “failure.”

Germany, they argued, has a sacred responsibility to humanity for its role in World War II. It has failed in that responsibility.

But if Germany’s decision is a failure, then its actions are an aberration, a deviation from some expected historic norm.

“Failure” substitutes open complicity with omission. It replaces the systemic with the particular.

Instead, Germany’s position demonstrates that, despite the horrors that German imperialism has inflicted on humanity in the 20th century, the German ruling class has been able to preserve fascism’s ideological and material basis.

Rather than a “failure,” then, German policy represents a remarkable success. It testifies to the great resilience of the colonial mentality.

And it makes clear that moral condemnation—or, worse still, self-designated “guilt”—is an inadequate framework by which to establish accountability for the crimes of imperial and colonial domination.

Wretched legacy
Germany’s stance is a gift for those of us who consider ourselves anti-imperialists. It dismantles one of the central ideological defenses of the imperial order.

For decades, Europe and North America have worked to cleave Nazism from the colonial tradition that birthed it. The singular evil of the Holocaust became the wellspring of the Germans’ singular “guilt”—a mechanism that both laundered the wretched legacies of the wider colonial world and obscured the threads that bound its sordid history to the present day.

If Nazism stood alone in the annals of human barbarity, then everything else could be cast to the side: the exterminations, the enslavement, the famines, the plunder.

The genocide of the Herero people—and Germany’s flagrant inability to address this legacy—provides an immediate rebuke. It was in modern-day Namibia that Germany’s Imperial Chancery recorded perhaps the first use of the term Konzentrationslager—the concentration camp—to describe an instrument of mass extermination.

Among other abuses, inmates were tortured, starved, worked to death, condemned to disease, and subject to medical experiments. Most were women and children.

As cruel punishment for the 1904 revolt, Germany killed some 65,000 Herero people in four years and over 10,000 Nama people who also dared rise up against its domination. It was in Namibia that Germany honed the tools that it would turn against Communists, Jews, Roma, Sinti, homosexuals and people with mental illnesses just a few decades later.

But the subjugation of Namibia furnished just part of that wretched toolkit.

Hitler’s “Wild West”
Adolf Hitler sought to conquer the “Wild East” and build a slave nation of the Slavs—a people who, by virtue of their past abuse by leaders like Charlemagne, gave the etymological root to the word “slave.” Hitler envisioned a settler-colonial project that would secure “living space” for Volksdeutsche—or “members of the German nation”—and obliterate the “Bolshevik subhumans.”

He found a template in U.S. “manifest destiny” and its project of westward expansion.

In 1928, Hitler remarked approvingly how U.S. settlers had “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage.” Hitler would create a “Wild West” to Germany’s East.

In this way, Nazism carried forward the European colonial tradition against the greatest threat that had yet emerged against it: the Soviet Union.

The Soviet counteroffensive not only crushed the dreams of the Third Reich and liberated Europe from fascist imperialism. It also cast a permanent shadow on the mythos of German “guilt.”

The Soviet Union was, after all, the Germans’ first target. Hitler promised that Germany would stand as the “bulwark” of the West against Bolshevism—a position that, for a time, found broad support among the Western ruling class.

Through its war of extermination and enslavement, the Nazi colonial project claimed an estimated 27 million Soviet lives.

Through deliberate starvation, disease, mass executions, it massacred 3.5 million Soviet prisoners of war, considering them to be Untermensch—or subhuman. Auschwitz was first built for them.

Germany systematically exterminated one in four Belarussians, often by forcing entire village populations into barns and churches, setting them on fire, and shooting anyone who dared to escape. The crimes are too ghastly and numerous to recount here.

If Germany was compelled by “guilt” to pay reparations to Israel for decades after the war, why did its reparations to the Soviet Union cease within years of its defeat? In violation of the Potsdam Agreement, the Western occupation zones stopped their payments to the Soviets before the ashes of war had settled.

The USSR could only plug the gap with technology transfers from its own occupation zone in the East, which proved to be a major burden on the development of the young socialist state.

Not with Israel.

Konrad Adenauer, then chancellor of West Germany, spoke bluntly when he met David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, in 1960.

Adenauer said,

We will help you, out of moral reasons and out of practical politics. Israel is the fortress of the West, Israel has to develop in the interest of the whole world.

These transfers—in the form of financial assistance, weapons sales, and diplomatic cover—continue to this day.

Here, the payment of reparations reveals itself to have a purely political character, an instrument to bolster the allies of imperialism while stifling the development of its adversaries.

If Germany is compelled by “guilt” to support Israel, then why does it not extend the same support to the Russian and Belarussian people?

Instead, Germany’s former victims have retained their historic designation as Untermensch.

“People simply die”
In 2022, German researcher Florence Gaub channeled the virulent Russophobia that exploded in her country by repeating a trope that will not be unfamiliar to the colonized. “We should not forget that, even if Russians look European, they are not European,” she said.

In a cultural sense, they think differently about violence or death… That is why they treat death differently, that people simply die.

When a German activist asked whether the German government would consider the siege of Leningrad—which claimed 1.5 million lives in 900 days—as a genocide, Annalena Baerbock’s foreign ministry replied that the UN Genocide Convention did not apply retroactively. Of course, this statute of limitations did not seem to bind the Bundestag, which months earlier recognized a famine that struck the Soviet Union as a genocide in Ukraine, putting it on equal footing with the Holocaust in a grotesque act of historical revisionism.

If Germany is so riven by “guilt,” then why did the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) stand by the people of Palestine?

At the level of official policy, the GDR differentiated between Jews and the state of Israel—a position that would be considered anti-Semitic in Germany today.

The GDR saw that Israel was deeply imbricated in the system of imperialism led by the U.S. It cooperated closely with Arab countries and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)—including at a military level.

The first PLO office in Eastern Europe opened in Berlin in 1973.

The GDR considered Zionism as a “reactionary nationalist ideology of the Jewish big bourgeoisie.”

This echoed the analysis of Palestinian thinkers like Ghassan Kanafani, who showed that Jewish migration to Palestine between 1932 and 1936 included a significant percentage of capitalists—along with a sizeable proletariat. Together, they transformed Palestine’s agrarian society into a bourgeois industrialized economy with employment reserved for “Jewish labor only.”

This policy of racial exclusion “was to have grave consequences,” Kanafani wrote,

as it led to the rapid emergence of fascist patterns in the society of Jewish settlers.

“Never again” must mean resistance
Anti-colonial thinkers understood Nazism for what it was. It was not alien to them.

They saw the coming storm and, when it passed, understood clearly what they had seen. Its ideology had already been threaded through their world.

In 1900, W.E.B. Du Bois had warned that the exploitation of the colonized world would be “fatal” to Europe’s “high ideals of justice, freedom and culture.”

Decades later, after the horrors of German colonialism had swept through Europe, the Martinican poet and thinker Aimé Césaire would repeat that warning–now as a profound indictment of European society:

They say: ‘How strange! But never mind—it’s Nazism, it will pass!’ And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps and trickles from every crack… At the end of the blind alley that is Europe… there is Hitler. At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler.

Germany’s gift to progressive forces is precisely that it has exposed the continuity of the colonial project.

Germany does not support the Zionist genocide despite the Holocaust. It supports Zionism for the same reason that it birthed Nazism.

It backs Benjamin Netanyahu for the same reason that it created Adolf Hitler. At a time of systemic crisis, both appeared as bulwarks of Western imperialism against the rebellious Untermensch, the subhumans—the people who “treat death differently,” who “just die.”

The history of colonial and imperial domination has seen many Final Solutions—each limited in its barbarism only by the technological capabilities of the perpetrators and the strength of the resistance mounted against them. That is why the words “never again” ring out from Jakarta to Santiago, Pyongyang to São Paulo, Hanoi to Buenos Aires, Kinshasa to Gaza City.

Gaza is a dress rehearsal for the violence that threatens workers and oppressed peoples everywhere as the crises of our century grow in magnitude. This is the historical tendency of capitalism in decay.

Now, the contours of our century’s struggle—dimmed by decades of imperialist hegemony—come into sharp focus.

On one side, an Axis of Genocide is in formation as Germany, the U.S., Canada, the UK and other ramparts of the imperial order intervene on the side of extermination. On the other, we find an Axis of Resistance made up of those who know colonialism’s wretched face.

If “never again” is to have any meaning at all, it must mean joining the resistance and dismantling the imperialist system before it absorbs us into its unrelenting death march.

https://mronline.org/2024/01/26/germany ... ed-hitler/

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EU and NATO Heading for the Abyss Over Foreign Policy Foibles

Martin Jay

January 26, 2024

Gardner-in-chief Josep Borrell wants a new shiny state for the Palestinians but Ursula is perfectly happy with the present genocide program.

A number of odd statements have been coming from the EU in recent days, coupled with some even odder skulduggery giving rise to thought that the entire project is having its ‘last days of the Roman Empire moment’. Is it possible that the EU that we know is on its last legs and what we are witnessing is the final demise?

Ursula von der Leyen, whose grandparents were probably Wafen SS officers has said that if she doesn’t get her way in finding new money for Ukraine she will have to resort to dirty tricks. Well, she didn’t actually say “dirty tricks” but this is what is implied. And what might those underhand moves might be? In fact, there is already a motion in the EU corridors to make Hungary effectively a non-EU member state, a sort of rogue member which is still in the EU but has no voting rights. Given that the EU is anything but a democracy and that the institutions in Brussels are monolithic and consensus-driven (there is no ‘opposition’ in Brussels like in most democratic countries) it is hardly surprising to see nefarious activities which would make an African dictator proud of his handy work. The EU, or rather the super federalist elite which run it in Brussels like von der Leyen and her mates as Pfizer – yes, multinational corporations really wield the most power in Brussels and more or less own the European Parliament – are getting worried. The project is starting to indulge in in-fighting and creating a lot of mixed message in the media. Gardner-in-chief Josep Borrell wants a new shiny state for the Palestinians but Ursula is perfectly happy with the present genocide program. Perhaps she sees in investment opportunities in offshore gas off the coast of Gaza?

And so with the economy in the doldrums and the EUs most powerful member state Germany looking more and more like the Czech Republic in the late 90s, the uber elites like Ursula and the most vile MEP the European Parliament ever had – Guy Verhofstadt – are worried that the project can be hijacked by far-right MEPs come the next euro election in the summer. Ironically, in such a scenario where the European parliament’s main majority bloc would be a far-right group, the support for Netanyahu would peak and even save him from falling into his own quagmire of corruption charges, as the far-right in Europe support the Zionists, shifting from the once popular idea of wiping them out under Hitler’s ‘final solution’ plan.

But the EU would never be the same again. These MEPs support reversing the centralisation of power back to member states. And so it is hardly any surprise at all that Verhofstadt, a man so bereft of charm that he makes a pile of damp towels look exciting, gives another one of his fiery speeches in the European parliament with always the same theme: all our problems can be resolved if we has more money, more power and an EU army.

The fault is with member states, the European parliament’s top wanker-in-chief argues as he throws his head around and animates very much like a power hungry leader in the 1930s who got us in this mess in the first place.

Have you noticed lots of media reports pointing to war with Russia? Wonder what this is based on? Of course there is no imminent war with Russia but the pundits can’t help presenting one to us, proclaiming that Putin wants to take the odd European country, like a rich man who collects them like pets.

The reality is that this BS is being fed into the echo chamber because a panic is setting in both on a EU level and national one as elections are looming and the smell of defeat is beginning to fill the lungs of the corrupt who have been feeding from the same trough for too long. Create a panic about a war looming and enough stupid Europeans and Americans will accept spiralling consumer prices, high pump prices, insane utility bills (like in the UK), poor growth and no jobs. Few westerners see through the lies and see the ruse in the making. Even the Germans.

And this nightmare building is also going to be part of the new world order that Europe is trying to create with dealing with Hungary, which took over the role of the UK in its vetoing and generally being a pain in the arse at the EU top table. The thinking is that a two-speed Europe could be created so that the main powerhouse – France and Germany – can push through the federalist plan and make sure that when the dust settles, their industries are still left intact, or at least their political elite are still in their jobs.

Of course, this is the American dream as well as Joe Biden heads towards the polls and even blue collar workers in Ohio can see that he has set the world alight and can’t remember where the bucket and even the tap is. As western sanctions have backfired so spectacularly, America will always look to capitalise and so the division of spending on Ukraine is showing, more and more. But it is the war in the Middle East, set against a backdrop of sensational failure in Ukraine, which will be the deal breaker for Biden to fall and for Trump to turn up as the fireman and his rumoured large hose. Pity the Europeans. Those foolish folk who cried rivers of tears about the “occupation” of Ukraine by those nasty Russians but didn’t say boo about decades of the most brutal occupation in modern history in Palestine will pay the greatest price for their stupidity. How NATO comes out of this even as a survivor is anyone’s guess, but European elites will have to cough up more for defence when Trump gets into the Oval office. Bet your mum’s savings on it.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... y-foibles/

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Protesting French farmers begin their 'siege' of Paris

By JULIAN SHEA | China Daily Global | Updated: 2024-01-30 09:20


A tractor bearing the colors of France's flag is parked alongside other farm equipment blocking a highway north of Paris, France on Monday. MATTHIEU MIRVILLE / AP

A truck was overturned and set alight on Friday on a road outside Paris as French farmers began their blockade of main roads to the city in an extension of their dispute with the government over fuel subsidies and other issues, including what they see as unfair competition.

Discontent has been building for some time among workers in France's agriculture sector, one of the biggest in Europe, with farmers complaining that the taxes they face make their work increasingly economically challenging.

"This is the final battle for farming," Karine Duc, a farmer from the southwestern department of Lot-et-Garonne told AFP as she joined a convoy heading toward Paris. "It's a question of survival."

Arnaud Rousseau, head of the FNSEA farmers' union, told RTL radio the aim of the blockade was to "increase pressure" on the government.

"We will block all the main highways that go to and from Paris, up to 30 kilometers from Paris... our objective is to put pressure on the government, so that we can quickly find a solution for a way out of the crisis."

Stephane Sanchez, a director of FNSEA, was quoted by the Daily Mail newspaper as saying "the siege of Paris is being prepared with quasi-military organization", and grain farmer Benoit Durand told television station BFMTV the aim of the protest was to "starve Parisians" and "paralyze France".

The government responded by mobilizing 15,000 police and paramilitary gendarmes, with strict instructions to prevent any incursion by the protesters into Paris itself.

Security forces have also been told to ensure that the city's major airports, Charles de Gaulle to the north and Orly to the south, are able to keep functioning, and that the city's vital Rungis food wholesale market, an intended target of the blockade, remains operational.

"We don't intend to allow government buildings, or tax collection buildings, or grocery stores to be damaged, or trucks transporting foreign produce to be stopped," said Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin.

The blockade comes the day after climate activists threw soup at the Mona Lisa painting in the city's Louvre art gallery, shouting "what's the most important thing? Art, or the right to healthy and sustainable food?" and "our farming system is sick, our farmers are dying at work".

That same day, France's newly-appointed prime minister, Gabriel Attal, whose previous concessions had been given short shrift by protestors, visited a farm where he said what was important was "finding solutions in the short, middle, and long term … because we need our farmers".

Agriculture workers are also unhappy at competition from imports from other countries with different production regulations, with some politicians using the dispute as an opportunity to stoke wider opposition to the European Union.

Without specifying, Attal said the government was looking at "additional" protective measures, and he vowed "other decisions" would be made in the coming weeks.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20240 ... e89c8.html

Blow for German right-wing party after election loss
By JONATHAN POWELL in London | China Daily | Updated: 2024-01-30 09:20


A protester holds a placard reading "Democracy has no alternative" during a demonstration against far-right politics on Sunday in front of the city hall in Hamburg, northern Germany. MORRIS MAC MATZEN / AFP

Germany's right-wing party, Alternative for Deutschland, or AfD, has narrowly lost a regional election, its first test since a damning expose was published about its plans for governing and mass deportation of foreigners, which sparked massive protests nationwide.

Polls prior to the district election, in Saale-Orla in the southeastern state of Thuringia on Sunday, had indicated the AfD was likely to secure its second local government mandate amid growing support for anti-immigration policies.

The vote marked the first election following a report published earlier this month by investigative outlet Correctiv, which exposed a November meeting where AfD politicians and right-wing extremists discussed their plans for mass deportation of foreigners and unassimilated German citizens.

The story has sparked demonstrations in many cities and towns, with more than a million people protesting against right-wing extremism and in support of democracy over the last two weeks.

Christian Herrgott, representing the conservative Christian Democratic Union, defeated AfD candidate Uwe Thrum in the regional runoff.

Despite leading the race comfortably before the Correctiv report was released, Thrum only managed to gain 47.6 percent of the vote, while Herrgott secured 52.4 percent to emerge as the victor.

Thuringia is considered a stronghold for the AfD, and it currently holds approval ratings well over 30 percent there, as it does in several other eastern states, Deutsche Welle reported. Its support has also been increasing nationwide, hovering around the 20 percent mark.

Controversial plan

The district vote on Sunday was widely seen as a measure of civil society's mobilization against the anti-immigrant AfD, following the recent discovery of their deportation plan, The Guardian reported.

The Saale-Orla district has around 66,000 eligible voters, and is considered one of the poorest in the country, according to the German state statistics agency.

In a significant symbolic milestone last summer, AfD candidate Robert Sesselmann won the party's first county administrator post in Sonneberg, Thuringia.

Bjorn Hocke, AfD leader in Thuringia who is considered the party's most extreme figurehead, had stated that the party sees the upcoming statewide elections scheduled for September as a potential springboard for their entry into the federal government. Speaking to supporters after the victory in Sonneberg in June, Hocke said: "This is just the beginning."

Last week, AfD co-leader Alice Weidel said the party's success in Sonneberg could pave the way for their entry into the federal government as early as 2029.

Currently, the AfD is being excluded from power in Germany's 16 states, as other parties have ruled out forming any coalition with them.

jonathan@mail.chinadailyuk.com

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20240 ... e89ce.html

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EU’s Digital Services Act Poses Existential Threat to Freedom of Speech in Europe, Warns Retired German Judge
Posted on January 30, 2024 by Nick Corbishley

“This legislation… is a Trojan horse: it presents a facade of respecting democratic principles… But behind this liberal facade, the exact opposite is happening: an attack is taking place against the constitutional order.”

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen opened her speech at Davos this year by underscoring the “top concern” among the World Economic Forum’s partner companies, which also happens to be one of the Commission’s biggest worries as well: “misinformation and disinformation.” These two risks, she said, are “serious because they limit our ability to tackle the big global challenges we are facing – climate, demographics and technological changes, and spiralling regional conflicts and intensified geopolitical competition.”

The primary solution to the problem of mis- and disinformation, according to Von der Leyen, is to forge a grand coalition between “business and governments,” which, as luck has it, fits snugly with the WEF’s primary mission in life: to promote public private partnerships at all levels and in all areas of government, for the benefit primarily of its partner companies.


“It has never been more important,” VdL said, “for the public and private sector to create new connective tissue. Because none of these challenges respect borders. They each require collaboration to manage risks and forge a path forward.”

Through its Digital Services Act (DSA), the European Commission has already put into operation arguably the most ambitious manifestation yet of this grand coalition between government and business. The DSA imposes a legal requirement on very large online platforms (VLOPs) and very large online search engines (VLOSEs) to rapidly remove misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech. The European Commission has primary, but not exclusive, regulatory responsibility for these companies. In a few weeks’ time, the same requirements will apply to all other online service providers, though responsibility for execution and enforcement will lie with national authorities.

A Global Impact?

As time goes by, the implications of the DSA are likely to extend far beyond EU borders. Like its predecessor, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it could even have a global impact, through three mechanisms mentioned by Scott K. Ginsburg, a professor of Law and Technology at Georgetown University, in his paper, “When the Digital Services Act Goes Global”:

First, companies could adopt DSA-compliant practices worldwide. This is a common form of the Brussels Effect in Anu Bradford’s account—when companies align their global practices with Brussels’ rules largely out of possible efficiency of adopting those same standards worldwide. This is also the main mechanism in Nunziato’s account of the global effects of the DSA.

Second, governments might find much to envy in the Digital Services Act—which validates burgeoning efforts to bring the internet under government control, provides special tools for speeding up the removal of illegal content under local law, includes procedural rules that might limit the power of platforms to label or suppress other content, conveys power to evaluate risk mitigation measures, and sets out “break glass” crisis control mechanisms—complete with the possibility of getting six percent of the company’s global revenue for violations.

A third mechanism is possible as well. The European Union could itself
promote the DSA as a global model, perhaps incorporating parts of it into its
model free trade agreements.

As I noted in a previous post, the institution that gets to define what actually constitutes mis- or disinformation on very large internet platforms and search engines for the EU’s roughly 450 million citizens (as well as arguably untold millions of citizens far beyond Europe’s borders) is the European Commission itself:

The same institution that is in the process of dynamiting the EU’s economic future through its endless backfiring sanctions on Russia and which is mired in Pfizergate, one of the biggest corruption scandals of its 64-year existence.* Now the Commission wants to take mass censorship to levels not seen in Europe since at least the dying days of the Cold War. In this task it will have, in its own words, “enforcement powers similar to those it has under anti-trust proceedings,” adding that “an EU-wide cooperation mechanism will be established between national regulators and the Commission.”

As the DSA becomes an integral part of the national constitutions of the EU’s 27 member states in the coming weeks, it is accompanied by a wall of silence in the mainstream media (quelle surprise!). Even on Twitter/X there is little discussion, which may mean that Elon Musk’s social media company is trying to abide by the EU’s new censorship regime after already facing an “illegal content” probe over the Israel-Gaza war. Most EU citizens, meanwhile, have probably never even heard of this new regulatory architecture being constructed around the worldwide web, making this arguably the quietest coup in modern European history.

One of the rare voices of criticism I have found on the matter is an op-ed in Berliner Zeitung by a retired German judge called Manfred Kölsch. Titled “Judge Warns: Freedom of Expression in EU Is in Acute Danger,” the article is worth reading in its entirety (click here for an English-language translation on German financial journalist Norbert Haring’s blog). But for the purposes of this post, I have included a few of the choicest excerpts (translated with the help of a fluent German-speaking family member).

“A Trojan Horse”

Kölsch begins the article by unpicking the Orwellian aspects of the DSA:

This legislation on digital services is a Trojan horse: it presents a facade of respecting democratic principles. The EU Commission stresses that the DSA is intended to establish “strict rules to safeguard European values” and Article 1 of the DSA directly states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression”.

Behind this liberal facade, however, the exact opposite is happening: an attack is taking place against the constitutional order. Due to the complexity of the matter and the sheer volume of information available, its introduction is going unnoticed. The DSA opens up the possibility of [EU or national authorities] demanding the removal of entries that are not unlawful from very large online platforms and search engines…

Platform operators are required to “pay particular attention to how their services could be used to disseminate or amplify misleading or deceptive content, including disinformation.” (Recital 84). In addition, Art. 34 of the DSA makes a clear distinction between unlawful information and information with only “detrimental effects”.

However, the term “disinformation” is not defined in the DSA. But in 2018 the EU Commission did define it as including information that can cause “public harm”. In doing so, it determined (p.4) that public harm is to be understood as “threats to democratic political processes and political decision-making as well as to public goods such as the protection of health, the environment and security”.

There can be no doubt that false, misleading or just inconvenient entries need not be unlawful. Nevertheless, they can be declared unlawful at any time on the basis of the DSA. The EU Commission sets the standard by which disinformation is judged. However, this means that politically unsavoury opinions, even scientifically argued positions, can be deleted, and not only that: if it is classified as unlawful, there are social consequences.

One inevitable result is that citizens begin self-censoring to align their messages on the platforms with what is currently acceptable within the corridors of power…. The cornerstone of any free society — the perpetual exchange of intellectual and political ideas, even with opposing opinions — will therefore crumble.

Another layer of censorship comes in from the fact that the major platforms will have to analyse entries for “systemic risks” they may pose, evaluate them accordingly and then take “risk mitigation measures”. Systemic risks are deemed to exist if there are “likely (or foreseeable) adverse effects” on “social debate”, “public safety” or “public health”. Such entries must be deleted or blocked.

From Covert to Overt

We have already seen this sort of thing play out in the US, but in a broadly covert manner. As the Twitter Files disclosures showed, federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies helped to curtail, block and shadow-ban government-threatening lines of thought, such as suspicion and hostility toward vaccine mandates and interest in the Hunter Biden laptop, both of which have been well vindicated. Thanks to the EU’s Digital Services Act, the online censorship is about to become overt and legally permissible.

As Kölsch notes, the DSA threatens to choke public expression and debate on sensitive issues (a few examples off the top of my head: EU support for Israel’s war crimes in Palestine, Ukraine’s flailing military campaign, the Pfizergate scandal, the EU Commission and Council’s escalating economic war against EU Member Hungary over its refusal to support further expenditure on the Ukraine war, etc ) through a number of mechanisms:

Due to the generalised nature of the clauses used in the DSA, the platforms concerned will always find a reason to delete inconvenient entries. The coordinator will have the power to order sanctions and the fact checkers and content flaggers unlimited possibilities when it comes to submitting texts for deletion.

Unjustified deletions will be further encouraged by the use of automatic content recognition technologies, which is unavoidable due to the sheer volume of information to be processed. The European Court of Justice ruled (in a recent case concerning the General Data Protection Regulation; N.H.), that these technologies… are not capable of predicting the likelihood of future behaviour. Even the Advocate General at the ECJ has explained that the available technologies are not capable of making the judgements required by the DSA, e.g. whether an entry will have a foreseeable detrimental effect on the “public debate” or “public health” that would justify deletion…

[Nonetheless], due to the threat of fines of up to 6% of global turnover in the previous year for infringements, the platforms are incentivised to practise so-called “overblocking” (i.e. the excessive deletion of permitted expressions of opinion and information or the restriction of their dissemination; N.H.) for financial reasons alone.

The Commission and national EU governments will have additional means of applying pressure on platforms to ensure they respond quickly and robustly to their requests to remove illegal, harmful or misleading content. For example, the Commission and/or national governments will be able to impose fines of up to 1% of annual turnover if a company fails to comply with information requests under the Act. And to help expedite matters, a punitive fine of up to 5% of the average daily global turnover or revenues of the platform in the preceding financial year can also be levied.

One of the darkest aspects of the DSA regulation, says Kölsch, is the emphasis on preventative actions against illegal, mis- or dis-information, which sounds eerily reminiscent of “pre-crime”, the concept first coined by Phillip K Dick to express the idea that the occurrence of a crime can be anticipated and prevented before it even happens:

The monitoring obligation of all actors is preventative. It is always about “expected critical [effects]”,… “foreseeable adverse effects” on “social debate”, “public safety” or “public health”. The Advocate General at the ECJ has said what is legally necessary: These represent a “particularly serious interference with the right to freedom of expression” “because by restricting certain information before it is disseminated, they prevent any public debate about the content, thus “[d]epriving freedom of expression of its actual function as a motor of pluralism.” The Advocate General correctly points out that preventive information controls ultimately abolish the right to fundamentally unrestricted freedom of expression and information.

Contravening EU Laws on Freedom of Expression

Lastly, Kölsch warns that the DSA not only undermines Germany’s federalist model of governance but also contravenes many of the EU’s and national laws on freedom of expression and information:

This surveillance bureaucracy goes against federalism, which is anchored in the German constitution. Until now, media supervision was a responsibility of the 16 federal states (Bundesländer). According to the DSA, content-flaggers and fact-checkers are to be viewed as “trustworthy” if they have already proven themselves in the past in identifying objectionable content. In plain language this means: the previously known informants under the regime of the previously applicable Network Enforcement Act# will gratefully recognise that their position has now acquired the character of a monopoly.

A careful look behind the facade of the rule of law reveals that the DSA knowingly undermines the right to freedom of expression and information guaranteed by Article 11 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Article 5 of the Basic Law (Germany’s written constitution, agreed by the allies back in 1949 when the first post-war government was established in West Germany).

Here is the text of Article 11 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights:

Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.

Not everything about the DSA is bad. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), for example, has praised many aspects of the regulation, including the protections it provides on user rights to privacy by prohibiting platforms from undertaking targeted advertising based on sensitive user information, such as sexual orientation or ethnicity. “More broadly, the DSA increases the transparency about the ads users see on their feeds as platforms must place a clear label on every ad, with information about the buyer of the ad and other details.” It also “reins in the powers of Big Tech” by forcing them to “comply with far-reaching obligations and responsibly tackle systemic risks and abuse on their platform.”

But even the EFF warns that the new law “provides a fast-track procedure for law enforcement authorities to take on the role of ‘trusted flaggers’ and uncover data about anonymous speakers and remove allegedly illegal content – which platforms become obligated to remove quickly.” The EFF also raises concerns about the dangers posed by the Commission’s starring role in all of this:

Issues with government involvement in content moderation are pervasive and whilst trusted flaggers are not new, the DSA’s system could have a significant negative impact on the rights of users, in particular that of privacy and free speech.

And free speech and a free press are the foundation stones of any genuine liberal democracy, as notes the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU):

The First Amendment protects our freedom to speak, assemble, and associate with others. These rights are essential to our democratic system of governance. The Supreme Court has written that freedom of expression is “the matrix, the indispensable condition of nearly every other form of freedom.” Without it, other fundamental rights, like the right to vote, would cease to exist.

* While VdL was making her speech at Davos on the need to merge government and corporate power to censor illegal and objectionable information, a reasonably large majority within the European Parliament, consisting primarily of the three main voting factions, voted to keep the details of the COVID-19 vaccine contracts signed between the Commission and Pfizer and Moderna secret — despite the fact that the 2020 contract signed between Pfizer and the Commission was already published in its entirety by Italian broadcaster RAI in April 2021.

While acknowledging the “maladministration” involved in the Commission’s vaccine procurement practices, the European Parliament also voted to reject two proposals from the conservatives that aimed to pressure the Commission into digging up the infamous text messages between von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Bourla. Those messages are currently the subject of a criminal investigation by the European Public Prosecutor’s Office as well as a lawsuit by the New York Times.

Leaders will be unsurprised to learn that the Parliament’s latest move to protect VdL from further scrutiny went virtually unreported in the Brussels-based media and was also barely discussed on Twitter, but the disconnect is rapidly widening between the total lack of transparency and accountability flounced by Europe’s political elite and the Commission’s escalating attacks on even the most basic notions of privacy, anonymity and freedom of expression for the rest of us.

# From Wikipedia:

The Network Enforcement Act, also known colloquially as the Facebook Act (Facebook-Gesetz), is a German law that was passed in the Bundestag [in 2017] that officially aims to combat fake news, hate speech and misinformation online and can be seen as a precursor to the DSA. According to the Federal government of Germany, the law is necessary to combat an increasing spread of hate speech online, as well as defamation and fake news…

Like the DSA, the NEA incentivizes over-blocking, because it allows citizens and tech companies to make judgement on questionable speech immediately by blocking it within 24 hours, instead of allowing it to propagate or cause harm while waiting for a court’s decision…

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) stated that the Act could “massively damage the basic rights to freedom of the press and freedom of expression.”[8] The Human Rights Watch has called the law “flawed”, stating it could lead to unaccountable, overbroad censorship. It added that the law will set a dangerous precedent for other governments that also wishes to restrict online speech by forcing companies to censor on its behalf. Indeed, the RSF also noted that Germany’s law had also influenced Russia’s implementation of its own hate speech law.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/01 ... judge.html

[blindpig]

Poland Subordinated Itself To Germany On Two Fronts Over The Past Week



ANDREW KORYBKO
FEB 1, 2024

Poland’s new liberal-globalist regime has militarily and politically subordinated their country to ideologically aligned Germany just like the conservative-nationalist opposition warned would happen, which turns it into Berlin’s largest vassal state.

The Polish conservative-nationalist opposition’s fears that the Prime Minister Donald Tusk will subordinate their country to Germany were extended credence after two developments this week. Defence Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz signed a “military Schengen” deal with Germany and the Netherlands in Brussels on Tuesday while Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski declined to mention the word reparations when speaking with his German counterpart about World War II compensation the day after.

The first will enable Germany to freely move troops through Poland to its planned tank base in Lithuania and will likely lead to its first permanent deployment there since World War II judging by Deputy Foreign Minister Andrzej Szejn’s explicit welcoming of this exact same scenario in mid-January. Instead of Poland playing its previous government’s envisaged frontline role in containing Russia, it’ll now be Germany that’ll do this via its envisaged “Fortress Europe” concept, which is built upon the “military Schengen”.

As for Sikorski’s reluctance to mention the word reparations and his oddly phrased request for “the German government to think creatively about how to find a form of compensation for war losses”, this amounts to nothing less than the de facto rescinding of the previous government’s €1.3 trillion demand. It was always unrealistic to expect them to pony up, but as explained here at the time, it was meant to flex Poland’s regional leadership ambitions. They’re now a distant dream after Tusk’s return to power.

Taken together, Poland’s new liberal-globalist regime has militarily and politically subordinated their country to ideologically aligned Germany just like the conservative-nationalist opposition warned would happen, which turns it into Berlin’s largest vassal state. The Polish Armed Forces might soon come under the Bundeswehr’s tutelage, which will play the leading role containing Russia in Europe at the US’ behest, while Poles could be told that this is “creative compensation” for World War II.

The previous government’s reparations demand, no matter how impossible it would have been to force Germany to implement, served to present Poland as its neighbor’s geopolitical equal in their now-defunct regional competition for influence that ended with Tusk’s return to power. The de facto rescinding of this policy via the new proposal for a “creative form of compensation” instead powerfully symbolizes that the new liberal-globalist regime doesn’t dare to offend its patron’s historical sensitivities.

As the ultimate sign of fealty, they’ll also allow German troops to freely move through the country while also likely inviting them to permanently deploy there too after some time per Szejn’s explicit welcoming of this scenario, which physically entrenches Germany’s newly reasserted hegemony over Poland. The patriotic conservative-nationalist opposition will therefore struggle to restore their country’s sovereignty since the policies that their liberal-globalist rivals are actively implementing are meant to be irreversible.

https://korybko.substack.com/p/poland-s ... to-germany

(Not being dismissive of Stalin but didn't Bonaparte ask that question something like 'how much artillery does the Pope have?')

Greece’s Arming Of Ukraine With Russian Wares At The US’ Behest Will Ruin Ties With Moscow



ANDREW KORYBKO
FEB 1, 2024

Simply put, the US is setting Greece up to become a long-term vassal, but its leaders either don’t realize it or don’t care.

Greek media reported that their country agreed to transfer outdated Russian air defense systems and ammo to Ukraine at the US’ behest in exchange for Washington greenlighting the sale of 40 F-35 fighter jets to Athens for $8.6 billion and throwing in $200 million of Foreign Military Financing aid. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov reacted to this report by reminding his country’s partners of their contractual obligations and implying that the transfer of such wares without authorization will ruin their ties.

For as close as these two’s people are, their governments have recently drifted apart due to Greece’s suspicion of Russia’s comprehensive expansion of relations with Turkiye, Athens’ compliance with the West’s sanctions regime, and the May 2022 mutual defense cooperation agreement with the US. “Turkiye Turned Out To Be A More Trustworthy Military Partner For Russia Than Greece” despite Ankara’s export of Bayraktar drones to Kiev and history of voting against Russia at the UNGA.

It’s kept the straits shut to non-regional NATO members’ navies per its international legal obligations, profited handsomely from defying the West’s sanctions regime, and never even considered sending its Russian-sourced military equipment like the S-400 air defense systems to Kiev. As Turkiye continually strengthens its strategic autonomy in the New Cold War, neighboring Greece voluntarily submitted itself to becoming one of the US’ top vassals anywhere in the broader region.

As explained in this analysis here about the “Moldovan Highway” that’s being built in “emergency” mode between Romania and Ukraine, Greece is one of the most important terminal points for US military equipment en route to that former Soviet Republic. Furthermore, it envisages facilitating offshore Israeli natural gas exports to Europe via the planned Greece-Israel-Cyprus (GRISCY) pipeline one day, thus explaining its solid ties with Israel despite the latter’s ongoing war against Hamas in Gaza.

By contrast, Turkiye plays no role in facilitating the transit of US military equipment to Ukraine, and its ties with Israel have officially deteriorated due to the aforementioned conflict. Coupled with their unresolved maritime disputes and Turkiye’s troubled ties with its nominal NATO allies over nearly the past decade, it’s understandable why the US decided to turn Greece into one of its top vassals, as well as why some in Greece accept this status due to the regional security dilemma with their neighbor.

From their perspective, it’s better for Greece to balance Turkiye via the US as a junior partner and comply with its new patron’s anti-Russian demands than to risk the US entering into a rapprochement with Turkiye at Greece’s possible expense vis-à-vis their maritime dispute and possibly also Cyprus. Athens therefore decided to strike while the iron was still hot by taking advantage of larger military-strategic dynamics to advance its interests as its leadership considers them to be.

That said, the case can also be made that Greece has gone way too far in this respect since sanctioning Russia, facilitating the transit of US military equipment to Ukraine, and sending its own arms to that country are one thing, but transferring Russian wares without Moscow’s permission are another entirely. Military-technical partnerships are predicated on hard-earned trust that can easily be lost through reckless moves like what was just reported and become practically impossible to ever restore afterwards.

This adversely affects Greece’s objective national interests by risking the scenario of it no longer being able to rely on Russia in this respect, which could greatly limit its policymaking flexibility if the military-strategic dynamics of the New Cold War change in the coming future. So long as Russian-Turkish ties remain solid while US-Turkish ones remain troubled, then there’s no realistic chance of the US dumping Greece for Turkiye as its top regional partner.

Should that change, then Greece would be left in the lurch since it’s abandoning the long-running Russian dimension of its traditional balancing act, which could prove disastrous. The US knows this very well and that’s why it offered Greece to the deal that it did to transfer Russian military wares to Ukraine without Moscow’s permission in order to deepen Athens’ dependence on Washington. Simply put, the US is setting Greece up to become a long-term vassal, but its leaders either don’t realize it or don’t care.

https://korybko.substack.com/p/greeces- ... th-russian

******.

Serbian communists denounce west-backed post-election violence

NKPJ candidates took part for the first time in many years, forming an anti-imperialist election bloc with ethnic Russians.
Proletarian writers

Wednesday 31 January 2024



The recent attempts by western powers to stir up a second ‘colour revolution’ in Serbia have fallen decidedly flat, as the mass of the population continues to favour friendly relations with Russia.
Our party congratulates the New Communist Party of Yugoslavia (NKPJ) and the Union of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia (SKOJ) on their recent success in Serbian elections.

Despite discriminatory laws which aim to prevent real working-class representatives from electoral participation, the NKPJ was able to participate by including seven candidates on the Russian party’s list. This was the first time in 19 years that the working class of Serbia was given an opportunity to vote for communists.

As a result of the joint efforts of communists and the ethnic Russians who make up the Russian party’s base, the list received more than 11,000 votes, gaining one parliamentary representative as a result. Since the Russian party has never previously managed to meet this threshold, the newly-elected assembly member effectively owes his election to communist campaigning and communist votes.

One Russian party candidate was also elected to the assembly of the autonomous province of Vojvodina and to the Kragujevac city assembly. This positive result, the best the NKPJ has had since the 1990s, was achieved despite attempts by hostile quasi-leftists to organise a boycott of the elections.

Why participate?
The NKPJ took the decision to engage with the Russian party in this way as a result of their shared positions on some of the key issues of our times, and their desire to use the elections to take this programme to the working people.

Both the Russian party and the NKPJ are opposed to Serbia’s accession to imperialist alliances such as Nato and the European Union (which the NKPJ describes as “the dungeon of the peoples”). Both parties advocate instead for the strengthening of comprehensive cooperation with fraternal Russia and the Brics countries.

Both NKPJ and the Russian party consider Kosovo and Metohija to be an integral and inalienable part of Serbia. Both of them categorically oppose the introduction of sanctions against Moscow following the launch of the special military operation in Ukraine.

Both parties are also inheritors of the antifascist traditions of Serbia and the wider Yugoslavia from the period of the second world war, and continue to honour and commemorate those pivotal events.

Prospects for the country
The overall result of the 17 December election was the re-election of the Serbian Progressive party, which can be expected to continue to implement an anti-people and anti-worker programme in the service of big capital.

The government’s service to western monopolies has already compelled Serbia’s entry into the European Union and is pushing it towards increasing cooperation with Nato. Aptly described by the NKPJ as “the striking fist of western imperialism”, it can never be forgotten by the masses of the former Yugoslavia that Nato was the vicious warmongering alliance that inflicted horrendous devastation on their country in 1999, and which remains in occupation of the southern Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija to this day.

Still, attempts by the Progressive party government to keep the people on side by maintaining cordial relations outside of the western camp have drawn the ire of the west. The more extreme war hawks in the EU and Nato, ever ready to put down even the slightest semblance of independence in their vassals, would appear to be backing claims of ‘election fraud’ being made by an even more reactionary set of compradors.

With all the hallmarks of yet another colour revolution brigade, the members of the ‘Serbia against violence’ election list, having failed to achieve their expected win in Belgrade’s city election, are demanding the annulment of the election and their own installation as rulers of the country.

To support this claim, the ‘no violence’ rabble have been organising violent and destructive demonstrations in Belgrade, which have been endorsed as a ‘pro-democracy’ struggle by western media.

The NKPJ has strongly condemned these violent protests, as well as the shameful efforts of the opposition leadership to push Serbia into imposing sanctions on the Russian Federation and towards withdrawing from its current cordial political and economic relations with the People’s Republic of China – demands that are diametrically opposed to the best interests of the country and its people.

The party and its youth league have declared their continued intention to work for the unification of all really progressive and patriotic organisations in Serbia against western imperialist domination and capitalist exploitation.

https://thecommunists.org/2024/01/31/ne ... -violence/

******

From inside the European Parliament building: a Holocaust remembrance worthy of the name

Where there is a will, there is a way. The conference entitled “Tragedy of the Holocaust in Latvia” prepared by Member of Parliament Tatjana Zdanoka (Latvia) duly took place yesterday evening in her offices with all scheduled participants recording their speeches before an i-phone, with the film ‘Restoring the names,’ the center piece of the conference, being ‘screened’ on a laptop computer. In total, we were nine participants, six of whom had been flown in especially from Latvia. The three ‘locals’ were Tatjana Zdanoka, myself and a very brave and devoted Italian MEP who disregarded Tatjana’s ‘radioactive’ status due to the espionage witch hunt being brought against her by Latvian political opponents and delivered a short but powerful speech on the rise of neo-fascism in Europe.

All of these audio-visual materials will be posted online in a week or so, and when that happens I will re-post the links on this website. The material is very important and merits public discussion at the pan-European and global level because it raises questions that go far beyond the concerns of the Latvian speakers. They have their own very specific and justified fears about resurgent neo-Nazism in their country for which the most persuasive single piece of evidence is the annual gatherings in Riga for Latvian Legion Day to honor those who served in the Waffen-SS during WWII.

Just as the Nazi collaborationist Bandera is celebrated in Ukraine under the Zelensky regime, so in Latvia their own collaborationists are honored in the traditional march on 16 March through the streets of Riga which some members of the Latvian state government attend, in violation of EU law and rulings. In addition there is an ongoing year-round cultural offensive that insinuates into the public schools a film presenting those home grown murderers of Jews and other targeted civilians in a favorable light as defenders of the Latvian nation against Soviet occupiers and against their own non-ethnic Latvian minorities (read: Jews and Russians).

The speeches delivered yesterday evening have Europe-wide importance, because of the way those two named minorities were and are intertwined. The genocide practiced by Nazi Germany targeted both for extermination. For anyone who doubts this assertion, there is vast documentary evidence of what is today called ‘intent to commit genocide’ from the time of the Nazi-imposed Siege of Leningrad 8 September 1941 to 27 January 1944. More than a million Russian civilians died from starvation, lack of heating supplies in winter conditions of minus 40 degrees C and bombardment.

The post-Soviet ethnic cleansing intent of the Latvian government is silent about Jews but puts great emphasis on ridding the country of all traces of Russians by making life intolerable for them. I have written about this in past essays: see Does Russia Have a Future, 2015, “Latvia’s 300,000 Non-Citizens and the Ukrainian Crisis Today” (pp 137-140) and “Latvia’s Failed U.S. Inspired Policies Towards Russia and Russians” and A Belgian Perspective on International Affairs, 2019, “Republic of Latvia, Apartheid State within the EU” (pp. 308-315).

Just how the fate in Latvia of its two minorities, Jews and Russians, are intertwined was made clear in human terms as opposed to dry statistics by the testimony we heard yesterday evening from Igors Glazunovs, the son of a Jewish father and Russian mother, who was born in a prison outside Riga where his mother, a servicewoman in the Soviet army, was detained in July 1941. This was further amplified by the testimony of the conference organizer, Tatjana Zdanoka, also of mixed ancestry, whose grandparents were murdered by the Nazi occupiers of Riga in one of their two raids on the Riga Ghetto that occurred on 30 November and 8 December 1941.

Yes, when you look at the dates, you understand that the purge of Jewry, Communists and other ‘sub-humans’ was one of the first objectives of the German forces who invaded the USSR and touched off WWII on 22 June 1941. Within a couple of weeks, German land and sea units took control of the Latvian port city of Liepaja, where Glazunov’s parents were posted. A few weeks later, they were in Riga where they hastened to establish a Jewish Ghetto where none had previously existed.

The author of the film about the Ghetto yesterday shed some light on its creation and destruction.

When the Germans installed themselves in Riga in the summer of 1941, they expelled residents of several downtown streets and herded into this confined space, now ‘an open-air prison,’ all of those unfortunates whom they could identify as Jews. The ‘indigenous’ Riga Jews were put in a part designated as the Lesser Ghetto, while Jewish refugees from Germany and elsewhere in the Baltic region were put in the Greater Ghetto. They all suffered the same fate. The Ghetto was cut off from the world. Its occupants were starved. And they were then taken out to a forest not far from Riga and shot on the dates mentioned above after being forced to lie down in rows on top of one another following the technique first practiced outside Kiev in Baby Yar a month earlier under the supervision of the very same SS officer.

Note that the number of Jews in the Riga Ghetto murdered in 1941 was 26,000. This is a number that has a certain resonance for those of us following developments in Gaza today, which is one reason I say that the conference yesterday evening was very relevant to Europe as a whole and to the broader world. Those who have been saying ‘Never Again’ have to re-think a lot of things.

But there is more to the story that has direct relevance to current international affairs and the looming World War III. I have in mind Russophobia, for which Latvia is a key disseminator within the European Union and the world at large. By Russophobia, we mean racial, ethnic hatred. This is the very same Russophobia that has infected the elites of the Federal Republic of Germany and drives forward their and the EU’s support for the Kiev regime in its fight against Russia. Their ambition is to bring down the ‘Putin regime’ at any price. Put in simple English, the ambition is to kill as many Russians as possible and set the country’s development back several decades.

Jews and Russians. It is more than a straw in the wind that the Germans have to this day continued paying their monthly reparations to Jewish survivors of the Siege living in Russia while they pay nothing to Russian survivors of the Siege.

Before closing, I offer a word of comment on the film Riga Ghetto. Remembering the Names. A link to the film was distributed yesterday to all Members of the European Parliament. Hopefully some will view it. When Zdanoka makes the link publicly available, I will post it here.

The film is just 13 minutes long. It tells the story of the ghetto victims with great dignity and restraint, putting a name and face on 19 of those who were murdered, ranging in age from school children to grandparents.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2024/02/01/ ... -the-name/

*******

Genocide as a Political Weapon
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 29, 2024
Kit Klarenberg


Amid green hills dotted with white gravestones, thousands of people will gather on Saturday to mark the 25th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, often described as the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II.

On January 26, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a landmark ruling in the case brought by South Africa against “Israel” under the Genocide Convention. While it neither indicted nor convicted the Zionist entity of genocide or formally demanded a ceasefire, “Tel Aviv” has been warned by the Court in no uncertain terms to end its indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians. A failure to do so absolutely will lead to a genocide indictment.

Another of the ruling’s most significant findings was that “Israel’s” actions in Gaza could not be justified as legitimate “self-defense” in any way, therefore making a mockery of the longstanding, ubiquitous Western narrative that the Zionist entity “has a right to defend itself.” Elsewhere, it was ruled that the statements of senior Israeli government officials were indicative of genocidal intent.

Several representatives of Western governments that egregiously dismissed the “premise” of South Africa’s ICJ case or outright supported the Zionist entity in its losing battle have met and appeared in public with the same Israeli officials found to have advocated genocide in Gaza, since the 21st Century Holocaust began. One wonders whether they will be doing so ever again, given that they could be accused by the Court of complicity in grave crimes against humanity.

A January 14th Al Mayadeen investigation highlighted Western double standards on genocide. It exposed how NATO member states, via the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), invested significant time, energy, and money to convict Serb officials of that crime over the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia, despite significant evidentiary shortcomings. It asked the obvious question of why the same governments oppose convicting their ally “Israel”, given irrefutable proof of Zionist genocide.

Eleven days later, Sarajevo-based “fact-checker” Detektor Media published a deeply libelous hatchet job on the journalist and Al Mayadeen over the investigation, without approaching for comment. It leveled a welter of bizarre, provably false, and highly defamatory allegations, including; the investigation argued that the ICJ “must not indict Israel;” I am “on Russia’s payroll”, and the work was “commissioned” by Moscow; I denied the Srebrenica genocide, a criminal offense in Bosnia; I advocated further violence against Bosniaks.

In reality, not only did the investigation not deny the Srebrenica genocide, but it also explicitly called for “Israel” to be convicted of genocide and for other events in the Yugoslav wars to be classified as genocide, on the same grounds as Srebrenica. That many horrendous crimes committed in the enclave remain today unprosecuted and unpunished was also underlined. Detektor now faces the prospect of legal action, if its repulsive attack on myself and Al Mayadeen is not promptly retracted.

Detektor is part of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network. Its funders are a veritable who’s who of Western foundations, governments, and embassies, many of which backed “Israel” at the ICJ. This raises the obvious question of whether the outlet’s vile slander was “commissioned” by these donors, due to their hypocrisy being so comprehensively exposed. In a perverse irony too, Detektor’s duplicitous broadside amply reinforces how what happened in Srebrenica has been politicized and weaponized ever since by bad faith actors.

‘Narrow, Nationalist Agenda’

For decades, there has been a lively debate among historians about the Holocaust, known as functionalist versus intentionalist. While academics do not doubt or question that the Holocaust happened, how and why it came to be is for some a fascinating question. The dispute boils down to whether the wholesale slaughter of “Untermenschen” was Adolf Hitler’s plan all along, or if it evolved on the Eastern Front, with or without his personal input, approval, and knowledge.

There is no comparable debate in Srebrenica scholarship. One might reasonably argue this simply cannot be permitted. For one, it would highlight the ICTY’s failure to unearth any evidence a specific order was given by any named official to massacre the enclave’s entire male, fighting age population, and other major gaps in our knowledge of what precisely transpired there, how, and why. But more gravely, the event would be contextualized, which Bosniak nationalists are keen to avoid at all costs.

The context was a brutal ethnic conflict pitting Croats, Muslims, and Serbs, previously friends, neighbors, and relatives, against one another. Thrust into a hellish, ever-escalating cycle of oft-medieval violence, atrocities, and war crimes were routinely committed by all sides. Srebrenica was designated a UN safe zone and was supposed to be demilitarized. Yet, all local Muslim males of military age could be conscripted. And Bosniak forces there routinely staged savage attacks on Serb forces and territory, including undefended villages, where they tortured and murdered civilians.

Following the war, under the terms of the November 1995 US-brokered Dayton Accords, Bosnia was divided into two segments – Croat and Muslim-majority Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serb-majority Republika Srpska (RS). The Bosniak nationalist leadership was extremely unhappy with this, having rejected far more favorable Yugoslav, EU, and UN-proposed peace settlements before and during the war. They had naively believed their friends in Washington would assist them in their goal of seizing the entire country.

US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks document in extraordinary detail how, following the ICJ ruling in February 2007 – based on the ICTY’s findings – that genocide was committed in Srebrenica, “Bosniak political leaders exploited the verdict in order to advance their own narrow, nationalist political agenda.” At the forefront of this push was Haris Silajdzic, a member of the Bosniak delegation to Dayton as Bosnia’s Prime Minister 1993/6 and Bosniak President of Bosnia and Herzegovina 2006/10.

A March 2007 cable documents how in a private meeting with the US ambassador to Sarajevo, “when asked whether he intended to abolish RS or only remove Srebrenica from it,” Silajdzic “declared that he wants to abolish all cantons and entities” within Bosnia and void the Dayton Accords in their entirety. He further asserted, “Dayton was formed by necessity with pressure from…the international community,” the Bosniaks “had to sign…with a gun at our heads,” and “RS cannot remain as is.”

‘Orchestrated by others’

As per the cables, at the core of Silajdzic’s crusade was his legally dubious contention that RS was “an unlawful creation of genocide.” In multiple behind-closed-doors summits, he laid out assorted arguments for why the ICJ’s verdict “provided a new legal basis from which to retroactively question the terms of Dayton,” signed “under duress” during an armed conflict. He claimed to have only accepted the existence of RS as there had been no “official determination” of genocide in 1995.

Believing the ICJ had “changed the facts on the ground,” Silajdzic pledged to “exhaust every legal avenue to revise the results of genocide.” Repeatedly, US officials warned him in response that his desired “elimination” of Republika Srpska and the scrapping of Bosnia’s constitution and political structure “would be a unilateral abrogation of the terms of the [Dayton] Accords by Bosniak signatories and that such a step would be unacceptable.”

Undeterred, Silajdzic’s “elimination” efforts continued apace. US officials quickly grew exasperated with his campaigning, “increasingly confrontational posture”, and “willingness to pursue legal actions against the UN and other parties.” One cable bitterly questions whether he genuinely believed “his legal arguments have merit or he is simply seeking to force the international community to revisit Dayton.”

“We can only conclude that Silajdzic’s ‘legal’ strategy is aimed at further inflaming Bosniak Muslim opinion here, thereby focusing US and international attention on their grievances. It is unfortunate that few observers in Bosnia itself are able to see through the sophistry of his arguments.”

It wasn’t only “legal actions” that Silajdzic and other Bosniak nationalists employed to pressure the international community into backing their quest to dismantle RS and con their people into believing this was a plausible and legitimate aim. They also staged numerous publicity stunts for the Western media’s delectation. In April 2007, then US Ambassador to Sarajevo Douglas L. McElhaney visited Srebrenica, making a stop at the Potocari Cemetery and Memorial Centre.

As a contemporary cable notes, “Mothers of Srebrenica victims arrived unexpectedly to protest his visit and the international community’s acceptance of the ICJ verdict.” At one point, they “blocked the entrance to the memorial, holding signs stating ‘McElhaney does not support victims of genocide – you are not welcome here!.’” An accompanying embassy “comment” states, “Bosniak politicians frequently manipulate and exploit the suffering of the mothers of Srebrenica victims, who lack a sophisticated understanding of Bosnia’s criminal justice system let alone international jurisprudence.”

“Though their pain and suffering is real and justified, this ‘spontaneous’ protest was likely orchestrated by others. The mothers do not speak English, and we overheard several asking for translations of their English language signs. In addition, during the protest, a local embassy staff member overheard one of the mothers receiving instructions by phone.”

Three months later, a cable recorded how in the intervening time, “Bosniak political leaders created a tent settlement of ‘Srebrenica refugees’ in Sarajevo, staged protests outside the Presidency, and even faked an attack on a Bosniak returnee in the village of Ljeskovik to gain public support for Srebrenica’s secession” from RS. Detektor Media’s attack on this journalist and Al Mayadeen should perhaps thus be viewed as the latest Bosniak nationalist publicity stunt intended to secure Republika Srpska’s “elimination”.

After all, a key source for the hatchet job’s most libelous charges was none other than Emir Suljagic, director of the Western-funded Potocari Cemetery and Memorial Centre. Currently, RS authorities are engaged in a bitter legal fight with Bosnia’s national government, which is seeking to claim all Republika Sprska’s territory as its state property. If successful, Bosniak nationalists would be one step closer to voiding Dayton. As such, anyone asking awkward questions must be silenced.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/01/ ... al-weapon/

[blindpig]

PTB demands respect for farmers across Europe: “They must be able to live from their work”

In light of the massive farmers protests in countries across Europe, the Workers’ Party of Belgium writes about the root causes behind the farmers’ grievances

February 02, 2024 by Workers' Party of Belgium


"Less capitalists, more agriculturalists". Photo: Marc Botenga/ PTB

All across Europe, farmers are making their voices heard. In Belgium too, actions and blockages have been taking place across the country. The movement, which started from the base, is supported by agricultural unions, both in the south and the north of the country. “It is not normal that farmers cannot make a living from their work, we support their mobilization,” declares PTB president Raoul Hedebouw. For the agricultural world, the cup is full and the anger is deep. The reasons for this are numerous.

Everything for agribusiness and distribution, nothing for our farmers
Production costs have increased sharply for farmers in recent years, as have prices for the consumer. However, farmers do not sell their products more expensively. It is the players in agro-industry and mass distribution who are getting rich on the backs of both of them.

Thus, the United Federation of Breeders and Farmers Groups (FUGEA) explains: “Despite our efforts, one thing has not changed: the purchase prices of our products! How can we be asked to change our practices without providing us with the financial return necessary to support this transition? This observation is all the more glaring as we have experienced unprecedented inflation over the previous two years. This inflation materialized in the sales prices to consumers, but, on the producers’ side, the purchase price of our production remained the same. While our charges exploded. But where did the margin go? The answer seems obvious to us… And it is unbearable, when we are struggling more than ever to keep our heads above water, to know that our ‘partners’ in the sectors are recording unprecedented economic results. There are no other solutions than to urgently put in place concrete solutions to prohibit the purchase of agricultural products below their cost price and to require transparency from manufacturers and supermarkets on their profit margins. Today, the vast majority of agro-industry players are guilty for the situation on our farms and we will firmly remind them.”

A farmer sells his beef for 3 euros per kg, but in stores you have to pay 10 euros per kg for ground beef, or even more. Someone is getting rich from this, but it’s not the farmers. And, in two years, the price of milk has increased by 30% in stores but farmers have not seen their income increase by 30%. It is the agri-food multinationals that benefit from it…

Today, it is indeed the big players in agro-industry and distribution who dictate prices – and strangle farmers. A minimum price previously existed at European level, but it was gradually abolished during the liberalization of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union. And nothing has been put in place to counterbalance the power of agribusiness and mass distribution, in a position of strength against farmers who must “negotiate” alone.

Despite working weeks of 60, 70, 80 hours, working on weekends and sometimes at night, the average income of farmers is often below the average Belgian income; some have to make do with 1,500, sometimes even 1,000 euros per month, or even less. This income includes aid from the CAP (see below). But farmers do not want to depend on aid, and they want to be properly paid for their work.

An unfair Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)
The CAP is one of the primary European policies, with a budget of several tens of billions of euros per year. Officially, it serves to support the sector and guarantee food sovereignty, but in fact it is used as an instrument to push the liberal agenda of agriculture built around the largest players in agro-industry. Its aid is thus distributed mainly per hectare and therefore favors large land holdings. 80% of its subsidies go to 20% of agricultural companies, the largest, without taking into account real agricultural activity. Even companies that are only landowners and produce nothing can receive subsidies. It is absurd that a billionaire like Fernand Huts or a large company like Colruyt can pocket European subsidies simply because they bought agricultural land.

And this aid is conditional. What makes life impossible for farmers is the bureaucracy imposed by the CAP and translated into lots of rules by the Walloon and Flemish Regions. Farmers have tons of declarations and forms to fill out, with penalties in the event of an error. It is estimated that farmers spend one to two days a week filling out forms… Their choice of life, their passion (because you have to be passionate to practice this profession), is to plow the land and produce food, not to do administrative work hours.

Today, all political parties say they understand or support angry farmers. However, the right-wing parties – the liberals and the Christian Democrats who claim to defend the agricultural world – did vote for the new CAP 2023-2027, and are therefore responsible for the difficulties that our farmers are experiencing today. Even Vlaams Belang, which claims to support farmers, voted for it. The PTB voted against.

Free trade agreements and unfair competition
In the 1990s, the European Union abandoned its protection of certain agricultural production to align itself with the world market. It was from that moment that prices fell, while we imposed (via the CAP) lots of constraints and standards to our farmers. As if that were not enough, the European Union signed free trade agreements with countries where production costs are much lower than here, or even where health, environmental and social standards are much lower: treaty CETA (Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement) with Canada, and more recently, a free trade agreement with New Zealand.

These treaties were approved by the right-wing parties, who today say they defend farmers (but also regularly by the socialist and environmentalist left-wing parties). With the PTB, we opposed it, whether it was CETA (even in renegotiated form) or the agreement with New Zealand. We also oppose the Mercosur agreement.

The earth, their work tool
Finally, farmers can no longer tolerate the erosion of their land. Since the beginning of the 1960s, the European Union has lost a fifth of its agricultural area, the equivalent of eleven times the area of Belgium. In Flanders, a third of the land today has been artificialized (French concept meaning used for commercial purposes and has an impermeable surface). In Wallonia, it is more than 11%. Still in Wallonia, between 1985 and 2022, 1,560 hectares of agricultural land were lost per year, or the equivalent of 2,000 football fields each year. However, we need this land to develop sustainable agriculture, feed people and animals, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Farmers are also fighting against large groups who are buying up and grabbing land, thereby driving up prices. This is what Colruyt is doing in Belgium in order to control all the links in the chain and further reduce farmers’ negotiating margins.

Farmers deserve respect
In light of this situation, the PTB has concrete demands to address the concerns raised by the farmers on the streets.

1.Establish mandatory floor prices at European level for agricultural products in order to ensure fair remuneration for producers who must be able to make a living from their work.
2.Limit distributor margins so that consumers are not the ones paying through price increases (and put VAT on food at 0% so that prices fall)
3.Tax excess profits from agribusiness and use this money to support the transition to sustainable agriculture.
4.Review the CAP and aid system, towards a fairer and less bureaucratic system.
5.Challenge free trade agreements that relate to agricultural and food products such as the EU-Mercosur agreement, CETA or the agreement with New Zealand: all products must be subject to the same health and safety standards. environmental issues, and we defend the principle of food sovereignty.
6.Stop the grabbing of agricultural land. Unless there is an exception in the public interest, no more agricultural land should be sacrificed. The purchase is reserved for real farmers.
7.Strengthen support for the installation of young and new farmers. Creation of a public investment bank to support farmers, especially young people, in the long term so that they do not depend on private banks only interested in profit. This is what Crédit Agricole was at the time, but was unfortunately privatized by the traditional parties in 1995.

This piece was first published on the PTB website.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/02/02/ ... heir-work/

Leftists step up protests over Dutch backing of Israeli war on Gaza

Leftist groups have accused the caretaker government of Mark Rutte of duplicity as talk of complying with international laws and human rights is accompanied by the backing of imperialist wars, including Israel’s brutal attack on Gaza

February 01, 2024 by Peoples Dispatch


A protest in Amsterdam, Netherlands, against the Israeli attack on Gaza. (Photo: Robin van Lonkhuijzen)

Leftist groups in the Netherlands have decided to intensify their protests against the government’s involvement in ongoing imperialist wars, including Israel‘s genocidal offensive on Gaza.

The New Communist Party of Netherlands (NCPN) and the Communist Youth Movement (CJB) have called for a protest at the air base in Woensdrecht in southern Netherlands on February 4 against the country’s supply of F-35 fighter jet parts to Israel. Earlier, the RED Socialist Youth (ROOD) and the Socialist Party (SP) criticized the Mark Rutte-led caretaker government’s support for the bombardment of Gaza by the Zionist state and the military conflict in the Red Sea.

According to reports, parts of the US-origin F-35 fighter jets are kept and maintained at the Dutch airbase in Woensdrecht, which are being ordered and used by Israel, in the war on Gaza. The Logistics Centre Woensdrecht (LCW) functions as the European distribution center for NATO, and consignments have already been dispatched to Israel after October 7.

In 2022, Israel imported 2.3 million euros worth of military goods from the Netherlands under the F-35 program. Earlier in December, a Dutch court dismissed a petition filed by human rights groups and activists demanding a halt to the sale of F-35 components to Israel. The court stated that it is a policy decision by the incumbent government that cannot be challenged in the court.

Despite being a caretaker government following the political crisis and electoral setbacks in November last year, the coalition government led by the conservative People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) has continued its involvement in imperialist conflicts by providing fighter jet parts to Israel and promising to deliver F-16 jets to Ukraine at the earliest.

Meanwhile, the far-right groups in the country headed by Geert Wilders from the Party for Freedom (PVV), which emerged as a leading force in the general elections, are trying hard to form a stable, working coalition to form a new cabinet in the country. Following the Israeli allegations of involvement of some UNRWA staff members in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood by Palestinian resistance fighters on October 7, Geert Wilders had already announced on social media: “No more money to the UNRWA. Never again.” Earlier he had also criticized the Dutch government for not taking strict action against pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protests.

Leftists have accused the Rutte government of duplicity, noting that even as it pays lip service to complying with international laws and human rights in global forums, the government has always excused Israel to continue its war crimes in Gaza.

The Netherlands abstained from voting on the UN resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, citing Israel’s right to seld-defense. In the wake of massive Palestine solidarity demonstrations in Dutch cities, the House of Representatives passed a motion moved by the right-wing JA21 party condemning the slogan ‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free’ as inciting violence. However, leftists and pro-Palestine groups in the country continue to champion the slogan as a symbol of justice and the struggle of the Palestinian people.

In their statement on January 29, the New Communist Party of Netherlands (NCPN) and the Communist Youth Movement (CJB) said: “Ordinary people in the Netherlands and around the world are fed up with war and destruction of lives, as evidenced by the large-scale demonstrations for peace in Palestine. Worldwide, young people are used as cannon fodder in the wars of this bourgeoisie, resulting in mutilation, traumatization, and death. They are deployed in wars that have nothing to do with security in the Netherlands, but everything to do with the interests of big business. Now that the Netherlands is considering reintroducing conscription, the importance of the fight for peace for young people is becoming acutely clear. Working people must not be made complicit in the atrocities that Israel is carrying out in Palestine!”

The communist groups have demanded an immediate halt to the supply of F-35 parts to Israel, halting operations at the Woensdrecht Logistics Centre as a distribution center for NATO, Netherlands’ withdrawal from NATO, no further funding and support for imperialist wars by the Dutch government, no Dutch soldiers outside the country’s border, and no US interference in the Netherlands.

Earlier, ROOD stated that “the West is doing nothing about Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians, they even offer open support. They only take action when international trade is threatened. According to Rutte, this is a ‘matter of principle’: the principle of sea containers over Palestinian lives…As socialists in the West, we must oppose our own government’s support for the genocide in Gaza. Stop the genocide! Ceasefire now!,” added the group.

As of February 1, 2024, Israel has killed more than 26,900 people in Gaza, while more than 65,940 people were wounded and over 1.9 people displaced.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/02/01/ ... r-on-gaza/

Journalists in Croatia fight against government’s attempts to stifle press freedom

Media workers staged protests in Zagreb and Split as government looks to criminalize unauthorized leaking of information from criminal proceedings

January 31, 2024 by Ana Vračar


Media worker holding placard saying “No source, no political problem” during January 31 protest in Zagreb. Photo credit: Zoran Pehar/Radnička prava
2024 is a super-election year in Croatia wherein Croatians will have the opportunity to elect their president, representatives to parliament, and representatives to the European Parliament. The party currently in power, the Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica, HDZ), is determined to win these elections.

Yet, the same party has been linked to multiple scandals, including ministry officials accused of misappropriation of funds and others responsible for causing deadly car crashes. In an attempt to avoid additional bloopers and uncomfortable conversations, the government has embarked on a mission to limit the space for press freedom, hoping that less embarrassing information will reach voters.

Journalists fight back
On Wednesday, January 31, the Croatian Journalists’ Association (CJA) organized protests in the cities of Zagreb and Split to counter the latest crackdown on press freedom. Specifically, they protested a new draft penal code, under discussion in parliament, that would criminalize the unauthorized leaking of information from criminal proceedings, making sources and journalists prey to state harassment.

Hrvoje Zovko, president of the CJA, stated that the legislation would turn the country into “a shell of a democracy.”

According to one article in the draft legislation, public officials, including members of the police, legal experts, advisors, and lawyers involved in proceedings investigating possible criminal acts by government representatives and ministries, could face up to three years in prison if they leak information. Journalists publishing such information wouldn’t face direct jail time, but they would likely be subject to lengthy inquiries to confirm if the published information was in the public interest.

The provisions of the law would include the police’s power to seize and detain journalists’ equipment to track leaks. This not only jeopardizes information and sources related to primary cases but also puts at risk information relevant to other investigations conducted by media workers, as the draft law offers virtually no protection against the exploitation of its provisions by the police and the public prosecutor’s office.

The risk should not be underestimated, especially as the new penal code is being discussed concurrently with the appointment of a new State Attorney General, who has expressed anti-media stances and support for the proposed legislation.

Some of those at the protest said that if the law is passed, it would mark the end of investigative journalism in Croatia. One of the media workers said that, if the law is passed, journalists will openly violate it and call upon everyone else to follow their example.

Government seeks to silence critical or prying voices
The roots of the problematic articles in the penal code can be traced back to the inquiry into ex-Minister of Regional Development Gabrijela Žalac. Messages leaked to the press suggested that someone with the initials AP was implicated in activities that landed Žalac under investigation for corruption. Prime Minister Andrej Plenković found himself among those singled out by the public as possible faces behind the initials.

After that, Plenković announced the government’s intention to change the law to prevent situations like these – “where things from official files are published in an uncontrolled, deliberate, political, selective, arranged manner and cause political problems” – from happening again.

The provisions in the draft criminal act are just one way in which Plenković’s government has attempted to shape the media field. In 2023, the Ministry of Culture and Media drafted a media bill that foresaw bans for media workers from criticizing courts and state attorneys’ offices, along with obligations to disclose their sources to editors upon request.

The CJA and the Trade Union of Croatian Journalists have opposed the government’s plans, garnering support from international media workers’ organizations. Both organizations also fight against affronts to press freedom through targeted lawsuits against journalists and media organizations. Croatia has one of the highest numbers of Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP) in Europe, according to the associations, with 940 recorded in 2023 and 951 in 2022.

“A big majority of these lawsuits are legally unjustified, but aim to intimidate and drain the financial resources of media outlets and companies,” Anthony Bellanger, General Secretary of the International Federation of Journalists said of the situation in Croatia back in 2022.

Despite the government’s determination to limit space for engaged media work during an election year, journalists and media workers said they will not be intimidated or fooled. Government officials downplay the risks posed by the penal code draft, but based on the government’s track record, journalists have little doubt that, if passed, it will further restrict media freedom.

“Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining,” Maja Sever, president of the media workers’ trade union, told the government during a speech at the protest.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/01/31/ ... s-freedom/

******

Anti-Belarusian Rumors Spread by Poland Aimed at Discrediting the Union State

Lucas Leiroz

February 1, 2024

Poland and the entire West continue to escalate tensions against Minsk.

In recent days, official Polish channels and Western media outlets have launched a disinformation campaign against the Republic of Belarus, accusing Minsk of carrying out mass arrests of relatives of political dissidents. The unfounded allegations came from extremely dubious sources and are linked to some extremist groups’ intention on destabilizing not only Belarus but the entire Eastern European region.

On January 25, the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs published notes both on its official website and on its social networks condemning the “mass arrest” of “families of political prisoners” in Belarusian territory. The texts also demanded a “resolute response” to the supposed initiative of the Belarusian authorities, in addition to calling for the implementation of new sanctions packages against Minsk to punish it for alleged human rights abuses.

“The mass arrests of former prisoners of conscience and the families of political prisoners conducted by the Belarusian authorities require a resolute response. A further sanctions package against Belarus should be adopted as soon as possible,” a Ministry’s X post reads.

For their part, the Belarusian authorities condemned the Polish attitude of spreading unverified information and denied the accusations. In a social media post, spokespersons for the Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “It’s a real shame that [the] Polish regime, which judicial system is ‘neither independent nor impartial’, which lacks independent media, kills refugees, has high-profile political prisoners has the nerve to disseminate unverified false information and threaten its neighbors in MFA account.”

Interestingly, the data exposed by the Polish authorities is from a questionable source. The news about the arrest of family members of political prisoners was originally spread by the “Viasna” group, an alleged “human rights center” formed by political opponents of Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko. The mere fact of being a dissident group to the Belarusian government is enough for the information released by it to be read with caution, as it obviously tends to be biased against the government. In the case of the Viasna group, the situation is particularly even more delicate.

Viasna has been operating unofficially on the territory of Belarus since 2003, when the Minsk Supreme Court banned the group’s registration due to its illegal political activities in the 2001 elections. The NGO’s situation became particularly complicated during the 2020 crisis, when there was an attempted color revolution and regime change operation in Belarus, with Western-backed protests and uprisings trying unsuccessfully to prevent Lukashenko’s re-election.

At the time, several members of Viasna, including the most famous of them, Nobel Prize winner Ales Bialiatski, were accused of financial crimes aimed at funding the illegal activities of saboteurs during the protests. Bialiatski was also the main advisor to the defeated candidate and EU-backed self-proclaimed “president in exile” of Belarus, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaia.

Tsikhanouskaia and her supporters, such as the members of Viasna, lead an international movement against the legitimate government of Belarus and went so far as to spread fake “embassies” around the world, creating parallel diplomacy between Western governments and the Belarusian opposition, violating Minsk’s sovereignty and all elementary principles of international law. To make matters worse, the movement is supported by a series of armed terrorist organizations that participated in the 2020 unrest – the main and most dangerous of which is the “Bypol” group, a Belarusian expatriate neo-Nazi militia that remains active in countries hostile to Minsk, such as Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltics.

Bypol, in fact, has been actively involved in the current conflict in Ukraine, joining pro-Kiev neo-Nazi militias. The group even claimed responsibility for terrorist operations that took place on Belarusian territory from the Ukrainian border, which shows the danger of the connections maintained by the allegedly “peaceful and democratic” Belarusian opposition. To make the case even more serious, Bypol is publicly hosted and trained by NATO countries, mainly Poland. The group promises to invade Belarus in the near future and wage a civil war against Lukashenko.

Considering all these factors, it is not difficult to understand why Poland is spreading unproven news against the Belarusian government. There is a situation of open hostility and Warsaw appears willing to engage in any initiative to harm Minsk.

In this specific case, the truth behind the distortion spread by Belarusian dissidents and Polish officials – as well as by the Western media, which publicized the case massively – appears to have been the arrest on January 25th of some dissidents (who may or may not be relatives of previously arrested people) for participating in financing schemes for terrorist groups. The history of the Belarusian opposition since at least 2020 is entirely linked to pro-Western extremist groups, which makes it not surprising that the authorities in Minsk carry out periodic operations against supporters of these organizations.

Data on the real number of prisons and supposed family ties with convicts are completely unsubstantiated, having been spread by the opposition without any evidence. It is not surprising that this happened precisely some days before the Union State summit, when the main Belarusian and Russian authorities met to discuss topics of strategic relevance for both states and establish cooperation projects. In practice, the case served as a tool in the war of narratives to discredit Belarus and the Union State in the midst of important events.

Unfortunately, Polish and Western hostile stance on Belarus is not limited to the information sphere. Recently, NATO’s plan to carry out large-scale military exercises in the Suwalki Gap region was announced. The drills will be led by Poland and Lithuania and are part of the current tensions around the 100km Polish-Lithuanian corridor. There is a Western narrative that Belarus is planning to attack the region with the help of the PMC Wagner Group to annex the corridor and thus link the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad to the Union State’s territory. Minsk has made it clear several times that it does not have any territorial interest in other countries, just as Moscow has denied any intention to expand to the West, but the constant fear of a Russian “invasion” has already become NATO’s “official mythology”, justifying escalatory, “preventive” measures by the Western alliance.

In practice, as an ally of the Russian Federation, the Republic of Belarus has been the victim of several military, economic and informational provocations. Expansion of NATO on the borders, imposition of illegal sanctions and spreading of unconfirmed rumors and lies have already become recurrent practices of the West against Minsk and Moscow. In this hostile context, the political capacity and diplomatic goodwill of the Belarusian and Russian authorities to prevent these tensions from turning into conflict situations is really noteworthy.

Contrary to what the Western media wants to make it seem, the patient and peaceful side in this scenario is the Russian-Belarusian one.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... ion-state/

[blindpig]

Polish farmers on strike block border with Ukraine


"Our patience has run out," say union leaders. | Photo: EFE
Published February 3, 2024 (7 hours 41 minutes ago)

Farmers oppose the increase in energy costs, the rise in prices of inputs such as fertilizers, the increase in imports into the bloc of foods that are cheaper than those grown in the EU.

In light of the protests that are shaking several European scenarios, the Polish self-employed farmers' union Solidarnosc ("Solidarity") called on Friday a general strike for next February 9 and 10 that intends to block roads, highways and border crossings with its neighboring Ukraine in protest against the decisions of the European Union (EU).

At an informal summit, the EU announced a group of measures that directly affect the community agricultural industry, which has led to demonstrations and closures of roads and ports in France, the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, Belgium and Poland against what They classify as measures “unacceptable for our entire agricultural community.”

Nations such as France have promised to scrap plans to increase tax contributions on tractor diesel, relax regulations on pesticides, pause new land set-aside rules and more safety checks on imported food and more, to try to calm concerns. spirits after several days of protests.


Farmers oppose rising energy costs, rising prices for inputs such as fertilizers, increased imports into the bloc of foods cheaper than those grown in the EU and the bloc's increasingly strict rules for the sector, in the midst of environmental measures that they describe as bureaucratic and “suffocating.”

In Poland, Solidarnosc accuses national authorities of "passivity" and condemns their commitment to respect all decisions of the European Commission on the import of Ukrainian agricultural products. "Our patience has run out," say union leaders.


In effect, farmers defend family farms from collapse and bankruptcy in the face of an overwhelming importation of unfair trade relations. "Polish family farms are the basis of the country's food security. Healthy Polish foods produced by Polish farmers are the basis of citizens' nutrition and health," they added.

Last September 2023, the Polish Government unilaterally banned imports of cereals from Ukraine, ignoring the decision of the European Commission. The decision was preceded by fraud related to the flow of Ukrainian grain, but it became clear that the embargo was insufficient to reverse the collapse in grain prices.

On June 5, 2024, the trade liberalization protocol with Ukraine will expire and, with a view to its extension, the European Commissioner for Agriculture, the Polish Janusz Wojciechowski, demanded at the beginning of January that the new wording restrict the import of Ukrainian products , because they "threaten the competitiveness" of the community agricultural sector.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/agricult ... -0008.html

Google Translator

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Tensions With Hungary Could Destabilize the EU

Lucas Leiroz

February 3, 2024

By using means of economic warfare, European countries threaten the bloc’s unity.

Recently, tensions between Hungary and other EU members have increased significantly. The neutral and sovereign stance of the Hungarian government regarding the Ukrainian conflict has obstructed the European bloc’s plans to continue financing the war on a prolonged basis. To coerce Hungary, EU countries are even willing to use methods of economic warfare – however, instead of simply “convincing” the Hungarians, the Europeans may be heading towards an unprecedented crisis within the bloc.

At the EU summit on February 1, the long-awaited 50-billion-euro package for Ukraine was approved, after Hungarian President Viktor Orban lifted his previous decision to veto the deal. The change in the Hungarian position appears to be the result of a strategy of blackmail and economic warfare adopted by the EU, as recently reported by the Western media itself.

According to the Financial Times, the European bloc was threatening to harm the Hungarian economy if the country did not change its stance regarding the billion-euro pact to support Kiev. The outlet’s journalists allegedly had access to a classified document in which Brussels’ decision-makers exposed a strategy to coerce Budapest, causing an economic crisis in the country and destabilizing the Hungarian currency. The EU apparently planned to cut off all forms of transfer of European funds to Hungary, trying to force the country into collapse.

“In the case of no agreement in the February 1 [summit], other heads of state and government would publicly declare that in the light of the unconstructive behavior of the Hungarian PM… they cannot imagine that [EU’s funds would be provided to Budapest] (…) [Without this funding] financial markets and European and international companies might be less interested to invest in Hungary (…) [These measures] could quickly trigger a further increase in the cost of financing the public deficit and a decline in the local currency,” the document reads.

Days before the EU summit, the Hungarian government had spoken out condemning the EU’s aggressive stance and stating that Budapest would not give in to blackmail. The Hungarian Foreign Minister, Janos Boka, said that his country cannot be controlled by “European bureaucrats” and emphasized Budapest’s stance of absolute neutrality regarding the Ukrainian conflict.

“Hungary does not allow blackmail (…) The agreement confirms what the Hungarian government has been saying for a long time: Brussels is using access to EU resources as a means of political pressure (…) Hungary makes no link between supporting Ukraine and access to EU resources and refuses to let others do so. Hungary so far will continue to participate constructively in the negotiations, but it does not allow blackmail,” he said at the time.

However, not even the strong stance of the Hungarian government seems to have been enough to resist European pressure. The sanctions that could be imposed by the bloc would represent a serious threat to the country’s economy, possibly destabilizing the Hungarian domestic scenario and leading to a worrying social crisis. Furthermore, the deterioration of ties with other European countries could lead to other economic problems even more serious than the end of Hungary’s access to EU’s funds. It must be remembered that Hungary is a landlocked country, depending on stable partnerships with other EU members for the functioning of its economy, which is why Budapest can easily be coerced to serve foreign interests.

It is possible to say that, by getting Hungary to re-evaluate its veto, the EU won an important dispute in its struggle to maintain the systematic support for Ukraine. However, the effects of this “victory” could prove devastating in the long term, as the price of approving the billion-euro deal seems to be European unity itself.

It must be remembered that, in addition to economic blackmail, the possibility of invoking Article 7 of the EU Treaty against Hungary was also considered. This article establishes that Brussels has the right to cancel the voting rights of a member which violates the bloc’s elementary principles. In this sense, the argument would be that not supporting Ukraine is sufficient reason for a European state to be prevented from having the right to vote in the EU decision-making process. Despite not being implemented, the mere fact that this measure was considered clearly increased internal EU tensions, further distancing Hungary and the rest of the alliance.

In practice, all these factors contribute to escalating disagreements between the EU and Hungary and thus worsening the bloc’s current situation of internal disunity. Obviously, it does not seem interesting for any state to remain within an economic bloc where the other members have carte blanche to blackmail it and coerce it into making irrational and anti-strategic decisions. This could generate a wave of dissatisfaction with the EU and motivate more countries to assume a sovereigntist stance in the near future. More than that, if tensions escalate, they could even lead to ruptures and exits from the EU in the coming years.

Once again, in order to help the Kiev neo-Nazi regime, Europe harms itself.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... bilize-eu/

EU Leaders Squander Another €50 Billion on Propping up Kiev Regime… and Self-Destruction

February 2, 2024

European elitist regimes are waging war in Europe against nuclear-powered Russia by wasting the public’s money to lavish a Neo-Nazi mafia in Kiev.

Finally, the European Union’s threats, blackmail, and arm-twisting have paid off to push through a giant €50 billion aid package to the hopelessly corrupt Kiev regime. This is while European farmers revolt against the EU leadership over higher energy costs and cheap imports from Ukraine that are putting them out of business and wiping out their livelihoods.

The EU leaders are committing the entire bloc of 500 million people to political suicide. The reckless cavalier attitude is something to behold. Bring on the pitchforks, Merci!

The 27 leaders of the European Union met in an emergency summit this week not to deal with the bloc’s mounting internal political, economic, and social problems but rather to lavish mountains of more aid on non-member Ukraine.

When the leaders held their last summit in December, it was a spectacle of back-biting and sordid wrangling. At that gathering, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban vetoed the allocation of more funds to the Ukrainian regime amid bitter recrimination and bickering. This time around, however, Hungary caved in to the intense pressure to agree on the package.

Days before the summit in Brussels this week, it was reported by the Financial Times that the European Council had drawn up plans to sabotage the Hungarian economy if Budapest persisted in not signing up for the massive aid plan. That speaks volumes about the perverse mindset at the apex of the EU bureaucracy. It demonstrates the undemocratic character of the bloc despite pretentious claims to the contrary.

Brussels had already frozen up to €10 billion in central funding for Hungary and there were reported threats to remove Budapest’s voting rights in the bloc’s decision-making which would have been a blatant violation of the EU’s declared principle of unanimity.

The allocation of €50 billion to a non-member state is astounding. Even more bewildering is that the latest largesse is only a fraction of the total aid that the EU leadership has pumped into Ukraine since the proxy war against Russia erupted in February 2022. Over the past two years, the European Union has given the Kiev regime an estimated €100 billion.

The United States and other Western allies have also plied Ukraine with another €100 billion. About half of this goes on weapons, while the other half pays for state financing.

As we have noted here previously, the cumulative funding by the West to Ukraine has far exceeded the historic Marshall Fund that the U.S. allocated to all of Europe for reconstruction following World War Two (about €170 billion in today’s money).

There is simply no precedent or justifiable rationale for this mobilization of financial support for Ukraine. This has all been done as a fait accompli by an elite class with no democratic mandate. No referenda have been conducted to consult the public about the inordinate expenditure. Indeed, polls indicate that the European public – like the American public – is opposed to their governments supporting Ukraine.

The Biden administration is vying with growing resistance in Congress to send Ukraine an additional $60 billion.

To boot, the Kiev regime under the puppet president Vladimir Zelensky is a byword for rampant corruption and repression. It is admitted by Pentagon sources that something like $400 million of military spending has been siphoned off by the Kiev junta. The real figure is plausibly even greater.

The grotesque allocation of financial resources to Ukraine has nothing to do with supporting democracy or defending the country from alleged Russian aggression.

EU leaders like German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen keep repeating a mantra about defending Ukraine because, they say, if it is defeated then all of Europe is in danger of Russian invasion. This is the most preposterous scaremongering by politicians who are ideologically blinded by Russophobia and slaves to propagating Western hegemony.

The latest €50 billion injection to a war-addicted Ukrainian regime is openly said to be for sustaining its government and paying for salaries and services. In other words, Ukraine is a failed state, and yet European citizens, workers, and farmers – who themselves are subsisting in hard economic times – are expected to bankroll a corrupt cabal.

Furthermore, the hardship that tens of millions of European citizens are enduring is a direct result of their political leaders and the Brussels bureaucratic elite pandering to the United States’ agenda of hostility towards Russia.

That U.S.-led aggression, which can be traced back to the CIA-instigated coup in Kiev in 2014 to bring a NeoNazi regime to power, has sabotaged Europe’s economy. European leaders have treasonously served Washington’s geopolitical interests and not those of ordinary Europeans. The insane imposition of sanctions on Russia has led to huge hikes in energy prices which has decimated European businesses and the living standards of consumers, workers, and farmers.

The higher costs of production are a major factor in the surging protests across Europe by farmers. Another factor is the EU’s undemocratic import of cheaper agricultural produce from Ukraine as a sop to the Kiev regime. Those imports have undermined farmers all across Europe, in Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Hungary, and the Baltic countries.

The scandalous abuse of European funds to prop up a corrupt fascist regime that violently suppresses political opponents, media, and the Orthodox Church, and glorifies Nazi collaborators, has one fundamental purpose – to prolong a proxy war against Russia. That war’s objective is for eventual strategic subjugation.

The Western regimes are so bankrupt and impotent in the face of their broken capitalist economies that they are seeking to exploit Russia’s vast natural wealth. This is the continuation of the Lebensraum policy of Nazi Germany by Western imperialists.

Ukraine has lost the proxy war against Russia. It is a shameful, criminal debacle. Up to 500,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed over the past two years by superior Russian forces. The vile Kiev regime, of course, wants to keep the war racket going for its insatiable grifting. Washington and its European vassals in high office want to keep the war going out of elitist imperial ambition, an ambition that is ultimately futile in the new emerging multipolar global order.

While European leaders were ensconced in the European Council in Brussels, the parliament was blockaded by angry farmers from all over Europe. Protesters were calling out politicians by name. The contempt is palpable. Paris and other capitals across Europe are being besieged by motorway chokepoints. National economies are on the brink as a result.

One might even perceive that European farmers in France, Germany, Belgium, and elsewhere, are implementing tactics similar to the Yemenis in the Red Sea. Squeeze the chokepoints and watch the empire writhe.

You couldn’t make this farce up. European elitist regimes are waging war in Europe against nuclear-powered Russia by wasting the public’s money to lavish a Neo-Nazi mafia in Kiev and by doing so making the lives of European citizens even harder. The upshot is political and economic suicide for the European Union.

The EU is holding parliamentary elections in June amid the dramatic rise of anti-EU or Eurosceptic parties. Two years of senseless war in Ukraine is fomenting popular disgust with the elite class. The anger out there may not even be contained by voting in elections. The fury seems to be beyond making little Xs in a box. A collapse is coming and heads are going to roll.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... struction/

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Reported EU Threats Against Hungary Were An Overreaction To Simple Requests



ANDREW KORYBKO
FEB 3, 2024

His requests from last December were reasonable and folks would be hard-pressed to find an average person who’d disagree with the need to ensure accountability and prevent unrelated funds from being redirected towards a different cause.

The Financial Times reported in the days leading up to last week’s EU summit that the bloc was plotting to sabotage Hungary’s economy if Prime Minister Orban didn’t approve €50 billion in funding for Ukraine over the next four year after obstructing a related deal on this late last year. He ultimately agreed to allow it in exchange for guarantees that his country’s blocked funds wouldn’t be redirected there and that a control mechanism be implemented, the latter of which ultimately doesn’t contain veto rights.

That’s actually all that he wanted from the get-go, which the EU had refused to extend during the last such summit in December, ergo why he obstructed their deal at that time. For this reason, Orban celebrated on Twitter by declaring “Mission accomplished. Hungary’s funds will not end up in Ukraine and we have a control mechanism at the end of the first and the second year. Our position on the war in Ukraine remains unchanged: we need a ceasefire and peace talks.”

The Hungarian leader also clarified due to widespread misinformation in the media about the purpose of these funds that they’re officially for helping Ukraine meet its civilian budgetary needs, not for the procurement of more military equipment, though some will inevitably be siphoned off for that. That’s why he was able to claim that his country’s position towards the conflict hasn’t changed since Hungary didn’t vote in support of keeping the conflict going, only to prevent the Ukrainian state’s collapse.

His requests from last December were reasonable and folks would be hard-pressed to find an average person who’d disagree with the need to ensure accountability and prevent unrelated funds from being redirected towards that cause. Nevertheless, the EU was so angry by his defiance of their demands to approve their proposed funding last December without those terms that it overreacted by reportedly threatening to sabotage the Hungarian economy if Orban obstructs this process a second time.

There were evidently enough rational leaders represented at the summit that the two parties, Hungary and the EU, were able to reach a compromise on this that gave Orban everything that he initially wanted back then. It can only be speculated who these people are (Meloni?), but they encouraged good faith dealmaking between Budapest and Brussels, without which the bloc would have crossed the Rubicon by sabotaging a fellow member’s economy for purely political reasons related to a non-member state.

Considering the outcome of the latest EU Summit, publicizing those threats through the Financial Times was unnecessary and arguably counterproductive since it further eroded the bloc’s soft power by lending credence to widespread criticisms that it’s become totalitarian over the past decade. This consequence was predictable, however, so it’s unclear why the decision was made to leak that plan to the press. One possible reason is that it was done with the shortsighted intent of signaling only to certain audiences.

In particular, the eurocrats might have expected that a deal would be reached all along following preliminary talks with fellow leaders, some of whom would have presumably expressed their intent to mediate a pragmatic compromise of the kind that Orban envisaged. Foreseeing that result and recalling the media brouhaha which followed the last summit a little more than a month prior, they might have wanted to preemptively shape the narrative that he capitulated and therefore sold out his interests.

The only ones who’d be receptive to that spin are hardcore EU supporters who hate him for ideological reasons, with there also being a chance that it could turn some so-called “Eurosceptics” away from him if they fell for that false narrative. The New York Times hinted at this in a piece published right after the summit where they wrote that “His real aim is to lead a populist and nativist rebellion against Europe’s liberal elite, though that campaign is showing signs of faltering.”

Their pathological fear of him winning more hearts and minds across the bloc, which could lead to other democratically driven populist revolutions with time, might have blinded them to the reality of how counterproductive it would be to leak their threat to sabotage his economy if no deal was reached. By doing so, they might have massaged the morale of their supporters and possibly misled a statistically insignificant number of his, but at the cost of inflicting irreparable reputational damage to themselves.

It's no longer a so-called “conspiracy theory” to claim that the EU undermines democratically elected conservative-nationalist governments through Hybrid War means after a leading liberal-globalist outlet like the Financial Times cited inside sources to report that this is exactly what they planned to do. The reader should remember that it’s now likely the case that a compromise was going to be reached all along since Orban ultimately got what he wanted, so this was thus done for purely political reasons.

He wasn’t swayed by that one bit since he’d already caught wind of that particular plot and was aware of their general schemes for years, plus the resultant compromise met his previously stated national interests, thus adding more heft to the claim that this decision was driven by propaganda motives. It backfired on the bloc though since nobody will forget what they threatened to do to Hungary, which will lead to him winning all those additional hearts and minds that Brussels just lost.

https://korybko.substack.com/p/reported ... st-hungary

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Demonstration of Occitan farmers, January 2024. (Photo: Raymond Trencavel / Wikimedia Commons / CC0 1.0 DEED)

Farmers’ revolt in France
By John Mullen (Posted Feb 03, 2024)

Originally published: Counterfire on January 31, 2024 (more by Counterfire) |

As Macron’s government, under new Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, moves ever further to the right, once again a radical mass movement is shaking the country.

Last year, the biggest workers’ movement for decades mobilised millions across France in an attempt to defend retirement pensions. This year it is the turn of the farmers to revolt. On Tuesday, 6,000 tractors were present at 120 blockades, and at least sixteen motorways were immobilized. Regional government headquarters have been covered with manure, and a number of hypermarket distribution centres (as well as Toulouse airport) paralysed. A column of two hundred tractors from the South of France was heading for Paris on Wednesday, intending to blockade the main wholesale food market of the capital at Rungis. In every town they pass through, locals express support and bring food. A ‘siege’ of Paris and of Lyon has been announced.

France counts over 400,000 farmers, as against 100,000 in the UK. Over four decades, farmer income has fallen in real terms by 40%, and a quarter of French farmers live below the poverty line. In particular, sheep farmers, cattle farmers and fruit producers are often extremely poor. This, along with unsocial hours and isolation, can have tragic consequences. Statistics show that at least two farmers a week in the country commit suicide.

Slogans painted on the barricading tractors vary. One can read, ‘I love my work, but I need to earn a living’, ‘We shouldn’t import food whose production is banned in France’, ‘Cattle farmers, wine producers, vegetable growers, one struggle!’, or,

We want decent prices, not subsidies!

Radical action works. The government has already made concessions, reducing taxes on tractor fuel, increasing compensation to cattle farmers hit by disease, and promising to put a little more pressure on the big supermarket chains, who use their market power to pay criminally low prices. This is very far from sufficient, and the vast majority of farmers are determined to continue the movement.

We must not see farmers as a homogeneous bloc. The largest farmers’ federation, the FNSEA, is dominated by owners of huge farms. The farmers’ movement can put forward progressive demands or reactionary ones. The left should support moves to guarantee minimum prices for producers and to cut into the mega profits of the food and supermarket industries. But other demands, such as for the abolition of the new rule that 4% of land must be left fallow at any one time, to help restore biodiversity, and similar calls to scrap green regulations, must be opposed.

Defend green options
There are three major national farmers’ federations. The biggest, the FNSEA, (which got 55% of the votes in 2019 elections to choose farmers’ representatives) has a leadership which is hoping that the government will concentrate on scrapping green regulations and increasing agricultural subsidies, subsidies which benefit above all the biggest farms. In contrast, the left-wing Confederation Paysanne (20% of the votes) is putting forward demands for minimum selling prices and a reduction of the profits of agribusiness and supermarket chains. The Confederation says blockades should be mostly aimed at supermarket chains. Both federations are, meanwhile, protesting at new European Union treaties which aim at reinforcing the dictatorship of the market and allowing imports into Europe which are not subject to the same environmental and animal-welfare rules as is local production.

Macron is hesitating before sending riot cops in, since the farmers have often been solid conservative voters. His interior minister even declared, “We do not respond to suffering by sending in riot police” (which must be surprising news to the many strikers, antiracists and ecologists maimed by police on demonstrations in recent years). And farmers interviewed in the media said they were confident the police sympathised with them. This is likely to change as the actions go on, and armoured vehicles were in place around Paris on Wednesday, while fifteen farmers have been arrested near Rungis. The situation is changing every day.

The most radical major workers union, the CGT, has called on its activists to attend farmers’ pickets and blockades and discuss common interests. The radical-left La France Insoumise also called for support, supporting demands to freeze the profit margins of the supermarket chains and impose minimum pricing. In some towns, left-wing mayors have organised meetings in support. However, some on the left mistakenly refuse to support the movement because of the right-wing domination of the main farmers’ federation.

This week’s radical tactics were inspired by the Yellow Vest movement of a few years back, and by last year’s pensions protests, which were particularly spectacular in smaller provincial towns with a solid conservative tradition.

More and more of the distribution centres of supermarket chains are being targeted as days go by, and this is a welcome development. With a major one-day teachers’ strike planned this week, a taxi drivers’ protest growing and bus drivers’ strikes in the offing, let’s hope the farmers’ example leads to more generalized revolt.

https://mronline.org/2024/02/03/farmers ... in-france/

[blindpig]

German Establishment Prepares to Cross the Rubicon
Posted on February 4, 2024 by Conor Gallagher

Berlin continues to double down on Ukraine, earmarking nearly more than $8 billion for the war in its just-passed budget. While the domestic situation implodes, and the government and media smear anyone – political parties, farmers, strikers – who opposes the direction Berlin is taking the country. And that list is growing.

It’s difficult to overstate how unpopular the ruling coalition is that just got its war-austerity budget passed. Nearly two-thirds of voters want to pull the plug on the current government – a rare step in Germany. Chancellor Olaf Scholz has some of the lowest approval ratings for a German chancellor ever. If elections were held today, the three ruling parties (the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Free Democrats) would struggle to reach a combined 33 percent. The public’s dissatisfaction has been steadily growing for two years, and yet the ruling coalition refuses to change course.

The complete unwillingness of the government to listen to voter concerns is unsurprisingly leading to the increased popularity of parties that go against the group think on foreign policy that is having direct repercussions on domestic policy. In a nutshell, the government policy is more money for war and less social spending at home.


The ethno-nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which calls for a rethink on Russia policy, has been the biggest benefactor of the government trainwreck, but the newly formed working class party on the left led by Sahra Wagenknecht is similar, minus the ethno-nationalism, and is also gaining in the polls.

Right now, all the focus is on the AfD and what to do about it.

The “Center” Cannot Hold

A recent POLITICO piece sums up the German elite line of thinking, declaring “the country’s domestic politics are becoming dysfunctional” and that there’s a need to “keep the country together in the middle” in the face of the “shrinking political center.”

It’s hard to know what exactly is “centrist” about pursuing war with Russia or destroying German industry, but that is what the “middle” translates as these days: keeping the Project Ukraine train on the tracks.

POLITICO frames it as though the voters have become dysfunctional by refusing to support parties that are making their lives worse and instead choosing to support the AfD – a party despised by the elite. One could also argue that this means democracy is working as it should. The parties enacting unpopular policies are losing support (except the Greens whose voters are quite satisfied with how things are going), and voters are going with an alternative – in some part to give an upraised middle finger to the establishment.

But that’s not the officialdom view, as expressed by POLITICO. No, it is that something is broken, and it ain’t the elites so it must be the voters. Something must be done about this, but what?

Protests, Strikes, and more Protests

What’s happening in Germany is that anyone who questions the logic of the war against Russia or complains about the economic fallout in Germany is immediately labeled, far right, racist, fascist.

That includes workers as labor actions have jumped in Germany and look set to continue. Train workers just went on one of their longest strikes ever, which was of course playing right into the hands of the far right.

Farmers, too, are now members of the far right.

Farmers blocked Green economics minister Robert Habeck from disembarking a ferry on his return from vacation on the island of Hallig Hooge.


The German political class was aghast.

Scholz’s spokesperson, Steffen Hebestreit, said it “is shameful and violates the rules” of democratic society. The governor of North Rhine-Westphalia state and a member of Germany’s main conservative opposition bloc said “this transgression is absolutely unacceptable.”

The government and media then began an effort to discredit the farmers based on the fact the AfD supports the protests and the following:

According to German media outlet Spiegel, members of several right-wing extremist groups, including The Homeland and Third Way, were at a rally in Berlin, as were AfD members. In Dresden, a video on social media showed people carrying flags from the Free Saxony right-wing extremist party clashing with police.

Habeck himself said this: ”Calls are circulating with coup fantasies, extremist groups are forming and ethnic-nationalist symbols are being openly displayed.”

This decision to focus on the presence of some right-wing elements ignores the farmers’ complaint that money is being taken out of their pockets to help fund the war against Russia. As one protestor said, “For a farm like mine, I would lose about 10,000 euros. For our businesses, it’s a catastrophe.”

The government in Berlin is scrambling to save or reallocate around $66 billion over the next several years, and one thing it elected to cut was subsidies on diesel fuel purchased for agricultural purposes.

Germany’s budget crunch is largely a result of its economic war against Russia and support of the destruction of Ukraine in a bid to weaken Russia. Forced to replace cheap Russian energy with expensive Russian energy laundered through middle countries, the government has thrown billions at energy subsidies to try to soften the blow. At the same time, Berlin is increasing the defense budget due to its perceived threat from Russia.

The diesel fuel is also affected by…Russia. For example, Germany’s Schwedt oil refinery, which supplies 90 percent of the gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and fuel oil used in Berlin, has been running at around 50 percent capacity due to the loss of Russian fuel.

Farmers and others are making the connection. From the POLITICO piece:

…one of the men, Martin Zühlke, who said he heads an association of biogas plant owners from the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. “When we look at the government’s policies, we see a lot of arrogance, ignorance and stupidity packed with ideology and still more stupidity.”

His companion, Thomas Strahl, who said he worked in a municipal office, delivered a far more extreme assessment — and one that went well beyond diesel — saying he’d been disturbed by the government’s arms shipments to Ukraine and by what he called its “Russophobia.”

“What they are doing today,” he said of the German government’s robust line against Russian aggression “it’s similar to what the Nazis did back then.”

POLITICO uses these men as examples of “radical, anti-government malcontents.”

These strikes and protests were quickly overshadowed by the ongoing uproar over an alleged far-right plot involving the AfD to start rounding up immigrants and deporting them.

The Jan. 15 report, titled “Secret Plan Against Germany” was from Correctiv. Here’s the deck, which provides the gist:

It was the meeting that nobody was ever meant to find out about. Back in November, high-ranking politicians from Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, neo-Nazis, and sympathetic businesspeople gathered in a hotel near Potsdam. Their agenda? Nothing less than the fine tuning of a plan for the forced deportations of millions of people currently living in Germany.

“The report galvanized German society like little else since reunification,” politicians from all major parties denounced it, 250,000 protestors reportedly hit the streets two weeks ago, thousand were out again yesterday denouncing “hate,” and there is wall-to-wall media coverage of the “plot” and protests. Even sports figures got in on the action with Christian Streich, SC Freiburg’s 58-year-old coach calling for people to “rise up” as “as advertiser brand names flickered from a screen behind him.”

There was just one problem: how much of the report was true?

The deputy editor of Correctiv Anette Dowideit began to walk back the bombshell report on a January 28 television appearance, saying that there wasn’t actually any talk of deportations at the meeting, nor was it similar to the Nazi Wannsee Conference in 1942, where it was decided to embark on the mass killing of Jews.

For its part, the AfD calls the Potsdam gathering nothing more than a “small, private debate club,” but not a “secret meeting dangerous to the public.” Four individuals with ties to the AfD were reportedly at the meeting.

Dowideit claimed that the German press “misinterpreted” Correctiv’s report (despite the piece including direct references to mass deportations and the Wannasee Conference) and ran with it, which led to the mass protests and even louder calls to ban the party.

As far as I can tell, Correctiv’s climb down hasn’t received nearly the same amount of attention that the original story received. Correctiv, a non-profit, lists Google, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, Deutsche Telekom, and Pierre Omidyar’s Luminate as some of its largest donors. Correctiv also coordinated the CumEx corruption stories, which involved then-mayor of the Hamburg city-state Olaf Scholz and have kept his feet to the fire as chancellor.

At the same time that Germany was in a meltdown over the AfD, the Bundesstag quietly passed a law clearing the way for easier deportations of asylum seekers, and criminalizing certain activities by aid workers who assist them, punishable with up to ten years in prison. There was no uproar over this action (maybe I missed it?). Here’s Deutsche Welle with the details:

Among some of the measures of the legislation — dubbed the Repatriation Improvement Act — is the provision for longer periods of pre-deportation custody, in a bid to give authorities more time to complete the process before having to release an individual.

The legal maximum duration of detention ahead of deportation will be extended from 10 days to 28 days.

Authorities will have more powers when it comes to conducting searches, for instance now being allowed to enter rooms of shared accommodation and not just the room of an individual being deported.

Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser noted that the number of repatriations increased by 27 percent to 16,430 in 2023 as a result of previous measures, and that this new legislation will help boost those numbers this year.

The same Faeser is calling the small AfD involvement in the Potsdam discussion on immigration policy “an active effort to shift borders and to spread contempt for democracy and misanthropy into the heart of society.”

Often lost in the media furor over the AfD is that the party gets a decent amount of support from immigrants. NC reader Tom67 reports from Germany:

​​About the AFD: there is something very interesting going on. Second and third generation Turkish voters are turning to the AFD. Their parents arrived in Germany, worked hard and became modestly wealthy. Now they see millions of people from the 3d world entering Germany and entering the welfare state almost immediately. The SPD and the greens don´t know, what will hit them. Sure there are Fascist elements in the AFD. But there is also a black member of the Bundestag and some prominent Muslims in regional parliaments. They are all united in demanding the closure of the border. And that is tremendously popular exactly among previous immigrants. Just the other day I talked to a Turkish shopkeeper who supports the AFD and I hear the same things from a big factory (1200 employees) in my area.

The Correctiv report could have also been an attempt to peel away some of this support. So in the end a questionable report about a meeting with loose ties to the AfD:

Helped take the wind out of the sails of worker actions across the country by linking them to a right wing allegedly engaged in a nefarious Nazi-esque plot.
Overshadowed actual government action on immigrants – the very stuff that protestors were so up in arms about when the AfD was alleged to be involved in a hypothetical plot.
And helped build support for a potential AfD ban.
That’s impressive.

In light of the Bundestag’s recent actions on asylum seekers (which is very similar to the AfD position), it’s worth wondering if all the government’s righteous outrage against the AfD is really about immigrants or some of the party’s other ideas, like detente with Russia and its anti-Eu stance. Here’s AfD leader Alice Weidel talking to the Financial Times in a January 21 profile:

Weidel, party leader since 2022, said an AfD government would seek to reform the EU and remove its “democratic deficit”, including by curbing the powers of the European Commission, an “unelected executive”.

“But if a reform isn’t possible, if we fail to rebuild the sovereignty of the EU member states, we should let the people decide, just as Britain did,” she said. “And we could have a referendum on ‘Dexit’ — a German exit from the EU.”

As far as the European Commission and its president Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen are concerned, that’s basically a declaration of war. As von der Leyen says, she has the “tools,” and she’s not afraid to use them.

Support Someone Else or Else

In the aftermath of the deportation controversy, an AfD candidate lost an election he was expected to win.

In a second-round runoff in the district of Saale-Orla in the south-eastern state of Thuringia, the AfD candidate, Uwe Thrum, lost to (CDU) candidate Christian Herrgott by 4.6 percentage points. Thrum got 47.7 percent of the vote, against Herrgott’s 52.3 percent. Earlier in January, the AfD candidate had 45.7 percent of the vote to Herrgott’s 33 percent.

The vote has been hailed as a sign that the backlash over the alleged deportation plan is beginning to dent the AfD’s support. Maybe. Or maybe more of those who voted for the SPD candidate and the left-wing candidate in the original election simply switched to the CDU candidate in the runoff.

The German media and respectable center has been labeling the AfD dangerous Nazis for years now, and the party’s support has only grown, so we’ll see if this makes a difference.

National polls are showing a small decline in AfD support:



On the topic AfD supporters, it’s important to remember that there is a fascist element to the party, but its recent growth is largely due to disenchantment with mainstream parties unresponsive to voter concerns as Adam Tooze summarized:

Amongst who count as AfD supporters, people with neo-Nazi attitudes make up roughly 13 percent. Those with far-right authoritarian attitudes account for another 43, which means that 44 percent of those expressing support for the party do so without a general identification with far-right politics.

For about half the AfD’s potential electorate, their vote is a matter of conviction. But on top of that for a large part of the AfD’s electorate their preference is a way of signaling – presumably to what they take to be the mainstream – that they are dissatisfied with the status quo and do not believe that their voices will otherwise be heard. When asked why they might consider voting for the AfD at the next election – as 22 percent of those in survey said they would do – 78 percent said that it would be a sign that they were unhappy with “current policies” with 71 mentioning migration policy, in particular…

Overall, the conclusion of the surveys seems quite clear. There has not been a general shift to the right. In addition to a base of far-right wing support, which makes up 15 percent of the population, the AfD is attracting a protest vote that takes it to slightly more than 20 percent support. This is driven by dissatisfaction with migration policy and a general fear of societal crisis.

This polling supports the conclusions of Manès Weisskircher who researches social movements, political parties, democracy, and the far right at the Institute of Political Science, TU Dresden. He argues that AfD’s support, which is strongest in East Germany, can be primarily traced to three factors:

The neoliberal ‘great transformation,’ which has massively changed the eastern German economy and continues to lead to emigration and anxiety over personal economic prospects.
An ongoing sense of marginalization among East Germans who feel they have never been fully integrated since reunification and resent liberal immigration policies in this context.
Deep dissatisfaction with the functioning of the political system and doubt in political participation.
Will the deportation report have enough staying power to change the AfD’s long term trajectory – especially if the ruling coalition continues to run the country into the ground and other major parties don’t show major divergence on issues like the war against Russia? While the AfD does have a base of right wing voters, it and Wagenknecht’s party on the left, are the only ones drawing the connection between Germany’s foreign policy and its woes on the home front.

The government still has a few tools at its disposal before escalating to an outright ban. The Bundestag is already debating how to deal with the AfD, holding the hearings “Resilient Democracy in a Diverse Country — a Clear Stand Against the Enemies of Democracy and Their Plans of Forced Displacement.”

The next likely step is that the party will lose state funding due to its “anti-democratic behavior.” But if that and more bad press doesn’t do the trick, a ban, which would be the equivalent to disenfranchising more than one fifth of the electorate, is looking increasingly probable.

The talk of banning the AfD picked up again around the protests. MInister of the Interior Faeser called a ban the “last resort,” an option that is directly correlated to the AfD’s popularity. Christian Pestalozza, a constitutional law expert in Berlin, tells Deutsche Welle that one prerequisite for a ban is that there must be probability that the AfD “will at some point have enough weight to achieve its goals.”

So that’s it. Voters either need to realize the error of their ways or the “center” will make that decision for them in order to preserve “democracy.”

Amid all this song dance, it’s easy to forget that there’s an easy way for the German establishment to return to what POLITICO describes as the safe and responsible center. Stop destroying Ukraine in an attempt to weaken Russia and stop making German citizens’ lives worse through a disastrous economic war against Moscow.

Unfortunately, for the German elite, a ban appears to be the more palatable option, but just as they failed to foresee (or refused to care about) the fallout from their latest war on Russia, they’re certain to underestimate the repercussions that would come with a ban of the AfD.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/02 ... bicon.html

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The situation in Kosovo and Metohija on February 3, 2024
February 3, 2024
Rybar



The north of the long-suffering region is once again restless: Albanian security forces have returned to intimidation tactics and conducted another series of raids.

Kosovo "police" yesterday stormed the Pec municipality building in Gorazdevac and began confiscating the vehicles and equipment of Radio Gorazdevac journalists. In addition, the Serbian flag was torn from the municipal building.

At the same time, raids were carried out in Osoyan and Klin. In Osojan, “Kosovo police” armed with machine guns burst into a hospital and pharmacy. Lessons at the local Serbian school were stopped early, and the children were urgently sent home. The head of the Klin municipality was taken away for interrogation.

Patrols of the “Kosovo police” have been strengthened on the roads. A column of “police” and “special forces” of 15 vehicles was spotted in the village of Zhach, which was heading towards the municipality of Istok.

By mid-day, “special forces” and “Kosovo police” left Osojane and Gorazdevac, seizing all documents and equipment from municipal buildings. Two Serbian employees were taken to Pec for questioning. At the same time , the Italian KFOR contingent reported that “Kosovo police” intend to break into the clinic building in Gracanica.

The number of such incidents has been growing recently.

On January 31, “Kosovo police” broke into a Serbian clinic in Pristina. The ambulance with Belgrade license plates was seized, and the doctors spent the night in the department. Because of this, local Serbs gather in Gracanica so as not to be left without a medical facility.

Yesterday, a “court” in Pristina sentenced Serb Dusko Arsic to 13 years for “war crimes.” At the same time, Arsic himself was arrested on December 8, 2021 at the Yarinje checkpoint in the presence of two minor children after he arrived to solve problems related to usurped property. The criminal prosecution is due to the fact that Arsic refused to sell land to Albanians.

The President of Serbia convened an urgent meeting, after which he addressed the nation. Belgrade will inform EU countries, Russia and China about the situation in Kosovo and Metohija and present evidence of violations by Pristina. Serbia will also demand to convene an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council.

In addition to attacks on the Serbian population, the Pristina authorities in Kosovo and Metohija have launched the process of abandoning the use of the Serbian dinar in the region. According to the decision of the Central Bank of the self-proclaimed republic, from February 1, the only currency used on its territory for financial transactions will be the euro. On December 27, the corresponding Regulations on cash transactions were adopted in Pristina.

The unilateral decision of the authorities of the self-proclaimed republic to cancel the circulation of the Serbian dinar in the region caused a sharp reaction from the leadership of Serbia. The fact is that residents of municipalities with a predominant Serbian population receive pensions, as well as salaries in schools, hospitals and administrations, in dinars.

Aleksandar Vucic said that another unilateral decision by the Pristina authorities casts doubt on the possibility of normalizing relations with Kosovo and further dialogue. As a result, the government of the self-proclaimed republic decided to provide a transition period to allow citizens to adapt to the application of the regulation.

However, Serbian banks operating in Kosovo are forced to close their branches. Thus, Commercial Bank stopped working in Kosovo and Metohija on January 31.

The goal of mass pressure on the Serbian population through physical, economic and psychological terror is to expel everything Serbian from the region. After the ban on the dinar, only education and healthcare will remain from Serbian state institutions in Kosovo and Metohija.

The timing for the mass raids and expulsion of the Serbian population was not chosen by chance: it is associated with visa liberalization and the mass exodus of Albanians from Kosovo and Metohija, as well as with the upcoming elections in the US and EU, after which the Kosovo issue may fade into the background. However, at the moment the situation is deplorable: over the past year, 10% of Serbs left the region.

Together with the channel Serbsky Vestnik

https://rybar.ru/obstanovka-v-kosovo-i- ... 2024-goda/

Google Translator

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Poland Is Scaremongering About War With Russia To Justify Subordinating Itself To Germany



ANDREW KORYBKO
FEB 6, 2024

In the modern-day “Fortress Europe”, Poland is playing a similar role vis-à-vis Germany as fascist Italy played with the Nazis, who were also junior German partners whose delegated task was to relieve some of the burden upon Berlin for controlling parts of the continent.

New Polish Defense Minister Wladysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, who’s a political appointee with absolutely zero military experience, said in an interview with local media that “I assume every scenario, and I take the worst ones most seriously” when asked about the possibility of Russia attacking his country. This is nothing but shameless scaremongering aimed at justifying Poland’s subordination to Germany last week after it informally rubbished its reparations demands and agreed to form a “military Schengen”.

Here are some background briefings for those who haven’t been following this all that closely:

* 24 November 2023: “NATO’s Proposed ‘Military Schengen’ Is A Thinly Disguised German Power Play Over Poland”

* 17 January 2024: “Leaked German War Plans Against Russia Are Aimed At Advancing The ‘Military Schengen’ Proposal”

* 19 January 2024: “Germany Is Rebuilding ‘Fortress Europe; To Assist The US’ ‘Pivot (Back) To Asia’”

* 22 January 2024: “The ‘Baltic Defense Line’ Is Meant To Accelerate The German-Led ‘Military Schengen’”

* 1 February 2024: “Poland Subordinated Itself To Germany On Two Fronts Over The Past Week”

They’ll now be summarized for the reader’s convenience.

German-backed Donald Tusk’s return to the Polish premiership emboldened the bloc’s de facto leader to implement the next phase of its hegemonic plans whereby it sought to expand its military influence across the continent. To that end, it proposed the “military Schengen”, which it clinched with the Netherlands and Poland last week to facilitate the shipment of troops and equipment to its new tank base in Lithuania. This corridor will likely be expanded up to Estonia and possibly Finland in the future.

The resultant “Fortress Europe” that’s being built at an accelerated pace nowadays ominously resembles its World War II-era counterpart in terms of structure and the strategic intent of preparing for war with Russia, which Poland is now scaremongering about to justify subordinating itself to Germany. The domestic context within which Kosiniak-Kamysz claimed that he’s taking seriously the scenario of Russia attacking it was addressed in these two analyses below:

* 10 January 2023: “Poland Is In The Throes Of Its Worst Political Crisis Since The 1980s”

* 14 January 2024: “Tusk’s Appeal For Patriots To Support Ukraine Is A Distraction From Poland’s Political Crisis”

In brief, Tusk has resorted to totalitarian means for imposing his envisaged German-inspired liberal-globalist model onto this traditionally conservative-nationalist society, which provoked its worst political crisis since the 1980s. He feebly tried to distract the public from this on a faux patriotic basis by hyping them up about the false threat that Russia poses to their country from the east, but this narrative was easily discredited after remembering that Poland borders the Russian region of Kaliningrad in the north.

With this in mind, both his and Kosiniak-Kamysz’s claims are discredited since Russia could already attack and invade Poland from that direction without having to first storm through Ukraine, not to mention via Belarus which has a much larger border with Poland. Whereas the first peddled this lie to distract from Poland’s political crisis, the second is reviving them to justify last week’s “military Schengen” deal that’ll see German troops freely transit to and from Poland for the first time since World War II.

Even more concerning is Deputy Foreign Minister Andrzej Szejn extending a “herzlich wilkommen!” (“warm welcome”) to German troops in the middle of last month if they want to permanently deploy in his country like they just agreed to do in neighboring Lithuania. The only possibly chance of preemptively mitigating public anger at this unprecedented violation of Polish historical memory and sovereignty is to play the Russia card that regrettably appeals to a lot of conservative-nationalists.

Be that as it may, the opposition is well aware of the Tusk Regime’s narrative tricks and is unlikely to fall for its scaremongering about a Russian invasion of their country from Ukraine, though it should also be said that the former government relied on similar such rhetoric to justify arming Kiev. Nevertheless, they and their base soured on that country late last year amidst the Polish-Ukrainian grain dispute, and the premier at the time even accused Germany of cutting a deal with Ukraine behind Poland’s back.

For these reasons, the latest scaremongering isn’t expected to reap the desired results, and the opposition would do well to maximally expose how the Tusk Regime subordinated Poland to Germany via the “military Schengen” on a faux anti-Russian basis that’s really about him repaying favors to Berlin. The previous government’s planned military investments were supposed to lead to Poland becoming the leader of a Central European coalition for containing Russia centered on the “Three Seas Initiative” (3SI).

That would have then in turn enabled Poland to restore its long-lost Great Power status with time, all with the grand strategic purpose of creating a new center of influence between Germany and Russia, which Warsaw could then leverage for multi-aligning between them, the US, China, and Turkiye. These plans have since been scrapped under Tusk, who preferred to subordinate Poland to Germany by having Berlin take over Warsaw’s 3SI through the “military Schengen” and turn Poland into its largest vassal.

His country’s new geostrategic role is to support Germany’s leading position in containing Russia in Central Europe, to which end Berlin will probably let Warsaw continue with its planned military investment program, but with the intent of it supporting German interests instead of Polish ones. Even if Poland participates in an extended “military Schengen” up to Estonia, it’ll be as Germany’s sidekick, not as an independent pole of influence in the region like its previous government envisaged.

In the modern-day “Fortress Europe”, Poland is playing a similar role vis-à-vis Germany as fascist Italy played with the Nazis, who were also junior German partners whose delegated task was to relieve some of the burden upon Berlin for controlling parts of the continent. Back then, Rome’s German-approved “sphere of influence” was in Southeastern Europe, while Warsaw’s will remain in Central Europe. The difference, however, is that Poland’s new subordination to Germany might last a lot longer than Italy’s.

https://korybko.substack.com/p/poland-i ... -about-war

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How the European LNG market is regulated in the USA and what does the Texas branch have to do with it?
February 6, 2024
Rybar

The Biden administration's decision to limit the issuance of licenses for LNG projects is presented in the media as ill-conceived and emotional, made based on environmental considerations and against the backdrop of the migration crisis. But problems with fulfilling contracts for the supply of LNG to European partners began much earlier. Or rather, they were initially included in the investment program of leading LNG producers in the United States.

In the material on LNG supplies from the USA, we indicated that the commissioning dates for most projects begin in the range from Q4 2024 to 2027. Previously, it was simply impossible to technologically complete the construction of new terminals, installation and testing of equipment. The US Department of Energy was well aware of this . The average commissioning period for LNG terminals in the United States ranges from 3 to 5 years, provided there is sufficient funding and no problems with logistics, equipment supplies or strikes.

New LNG projects in the US received sufficient funding only with the start of the NWO. This was an argument for European consumers in favor of abandoning Russian pipeline gas. But the incompetence of European politicians, none of whom had sufficient training in the field of energy, financing and operation of large industrial facilities, did not allow them to correctly assess the situation.

New reality for the EU
The peculiarity of the current situation is that even after the allocation of funds, it still takes quite a long time to get LNG ready for shipment. Time is the key factor.

The second important factor in interaction with American suppliers is the lack of long-term contracts for the supply of LNG. Representatives of India and China quickly understood the situation and made every effort to diversify supplies and conclude long-term contracts for LNG supplies from Qatar. And European importers mainly work within the framework of the spot exchange mechanism. The price of supplies directly depends on the volatility on the exchanges, which makes the EU market completely dependent on the whims of exchange speculators. Let us remind you that the owners of European exchanges are American investment funds.

Another important factor is the administrative resource of EU importers to defend their rights in court. In the case of Gazprom, European consumers successfully sought payment of penalties in the courts. In most cases, the evidence for the payment of penalties boiled down to the fact that allegedly during a certain period the exchange price was lower than the price specified in the contract. This, according to the offended Europeans, was the basis for paying a penalty. The largest number of such lawsuits against the Russian company were filed between 2010 and 2021, which suggests systematic preparation for the elimination of the mechanism of long-term contacts for energy supplies to the EU.

After the refusal of Russian pipeline gas, the situation in the EU changed dramatically. European importers are filing class-action and individual lawsuits against American suppliers for failure to fulfill LNG supply contracts . The piquancy of the situation is that the American supplier Venture Global is selling currently scarce quantities of LNG on the spot market, ignoring obligations to European partners. Moreover, after considering the claims in court, the injured party was not awarded any compensation due to the “limited export plan of the supplier company.” For the group of victims represented by representatives of EU companies, this is a striking contrast against the background of successful proceedings with Gazprom.

As a result, a situation arises where European consumers are simply put at the end of the queue for LNG, after being cut off from Russian gas. New LNG projects will, of course, be launched, but in accordance with the timing of financing and production. And it is not at all a fact that the price will be acceptable to European consumers, since their interests in this matter do not coincide with the interests of American investors.


Concern for the environment or an attempt to buy time?
It is now important for the Biden administration to avoid a high-profile media confrontation with European partners if these contradictions become public. So Biden's advisers are using “green concerns” to enable US companies to increase LNG capacity and maintain a dominant position in this market. Noteworthy is the fact that only the issuance of new LNG licenses has been paused . All launched projects are being implemented according to plan. There is simply no strength or means yet to implement new ones.

In the media, this is presented as an extravagant idea of ​​an inadequate politician, divorced from reality. But in fact, representatives of American financial circles and the oil and gas sector have gained control of the European energy market, which they cannot yet manage effectively. It takes time to adapt. It is this time that Biden’s “inappropriate” actions give them.

Speculation about the separation of Texas, where the largest LNG projects are located, is not without meaning in the current realities. But it is necessary to understand that TNCs own LNG projects as private property, and the jurisdiction of location is secondary. Similarly, US oil and gas giants own projects from Guyana to Syria, despite the difficult political situation and hostilities in the regions where they operate. Even if the current crisis leads to the separation of Texas, financing, technological support and operational management will in any case remain in the hands of TNCs.

Bad news for European partners
At the moment we see a fairly high occupancy of underground gas storage facilities against the backdrop of a mild winter. This puts pressure on gas exchange prices. But getting this gas at current prices is a problem. This is a strategic vulnerability of the European energy market, which is becoming increasingly isolated from alternative energy sources due to local conflicts. EU countries are literally becoming a group of victims from the actions of TNCs.

https://rybar.ru/ob-ogranichenii-na-vyd ... pg-v-ssha/

Google Translator

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Red Sea Chaos Highlights Problems With Italy’s Plan to Be European Energy Hub
Posted on February 5, 2024 by Conor Gallagher

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Italy has Algeria to the south, which was going to increase gas and oil exports. Italy had the LNG facilities and was going to be part of “the continent’s new economic growth engine.”

Such ideas were faulty to begin with, and they have come crashing down in recent weeks as the US-led Red Sea fiasco exposes deep issues with Italy’s plans to not only weather the energy crisis caused by Europe severing itself from Russia, but capitalize off of it.

The escalatory chain of events starting with Israel’s war on Gaza leading to the US’ exercise in futility to save international shipping from the Houthis has Italy scrambling to find other sources of LNG. Italy has been getting about 50 percent of its LNG from the US, while around 39% was arriving from Qatar, but as a result of the Red Sea chaos shipments are being cancelled or delayed.


That’s bad news for Italian energy company Edison, which is in the middle of a 25-year contract with QatarEnergy for about 6.5 billion cubic metres (bcm) per year of LNG, and Italian energy giant Eni, which in October signed a 27-year-deal for up to one million tons per year of LNG.

The Red Sea blockade is also causing more widespread supply chain chaos in Europe and could leave Italian ports, heavily dependent on the Suez Canal, at a disadvantage compared to northern Europe.

And it all couldn’t come at a worse time for Italy.

In its latest forecast, the Bank of Italy estimates GDP growth will slow from 0.7 percent in 2023 to 0.6 percent this year.

Italy’s annual inflation rate eased to 0.6 percent in December 2023 from 0.7 percent in November. But a wider lens shows how dire the overall picture is: throughout 2023 consumer prices rose by an average of 5.7 percent, following the 8.1 percent increase in 2022.

Istat reports that the slowdown was mainly due to “reduced pressure on energy prices,” which only climbed by 1.2 percent, but that’s on top of the 50.9 percent surge in 2022.

The effects on real wages have been a disaster:



In 2022, 35.1 percent of Italian households experienced worsening financial conditions, according to the National Consumer Union (UNC). The numbers haven’t been released for 2023 yet, but similar highs wouldn’t be surprising. The president of the UNC said just last month that an increasing number of Italians are on “forced diets” while still spending more on food.

This will lead to a worsening of one of Rome’s chief problems. Italy is no stranger to declining real wage growth. Since joining the monetary union in the 1990s and no longer being able to devalue its own currency, Rome embarked on decades-long efforts (ongoing) to tame inflation and real wage growth. They were largely successful except it backfired “in terms of aggregate demand, productivity and, ultimately, growth.”

Manufacturing continues its nosedive with December marking the ninth-straight month of declines in output and new orders, and a Hamburg Commercial Bank analysis notes that the purchasing managers’ index “fails to convey any signals of hope.”

Confindustria, Italy’s main business association, said in a recent report that industrial production and business confidence, already falling in 2023, are getting even worse due to the US-led Red Sea fiasco. It’s another nail in the coffin of Europe’s industry, including Italy, the EU’s second largest manufacturing nation.

Some Europeans are still pushing the idea that the EU do something in the face of threats to their industry from the US and China.


While Brussels dithers, the deindustrialization continues, but EU and national officials still talk about ramping up shell production and taking on Russia.

Neoliberalism, the undying ruler in the Eternal City, is always the answer to the perpetual bad economic news. And so the strip mining of once-proud Italian assets continues. It was only a few months ago that the New York-based private equity firm KKR, which includes former CIA director David Petraeus as a partner, reached a controversial agreement to buy the fixed-line network of Telecom Italia. Now the Italian daily La Repubblica is declaring that “Italy Is For Sale,” in which it describes plans for 20 billion euros worth of privatizations, including more of the state rail company Ferrovie dello Stato, Poste Italiane, Monte dei Paschi bank and energy giant Eni. The plan is reportedly necessitated by the country’s tax cuts. The roughly 100 billion euros Rome has burned through in order to address the energy crisis surely hasn’t helped either.

The La Repubblica story led to a good old-fashioned inter-elite feud over who does a better job of selling out Italian workers. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni attacked the paper’s owners (the multi-industry business dynasty Agnelli family whose patriarch was one of the original founders of the Fiat motor company) for being hypocrites as they sold Fiat to foreign owners. While they fight, no one has a plan for how to stop the decline of Italian manufacturing.

As of October, Italy’s average wholesale power costs were about 147 percent above their 2019 average, leading to ongoing carnage in energy intensive industries.

A few weeks ago, an Italian court allowed energy companies to cut off gas supplies to steel company Acciaierie d’Italia (ADI), majority owned by multinational steel giant ArcelorMittal, over mounting debts.This is the company’s main plant, which is in the southern Italian city of Taranto and is one of the largest in Europe. It employs about 8,200 people and many other jobs depend on the plant.

Italy as Energy Hub?

As Italian industry’s decline accelerates, and the government keeps selling off assets, its plan to transform the country into a gas hub for Europe is going up in flames in the Red Sea. Meloni’s predecessor, the unelected former Goldman Sachs man Mario Draghi, was one of the biggest proponents of the EU’s doomed Russia policy and pushed the energy hub idea, which was seamlessly picked up by Meloni.

It was never all that well thought out in the first place.

In 2021, Russian imports accounted for 23 percent of Italian fuel consumption with gas depended on more heavily (about 40 percent of imports), but it was said Italy was well-positioned to manage the loss of Russian fuels due its proximity to North Africa. Italy quickly began looking south across the Mediterranean as part of the EU-wide turn to Africa in search of energy replacements for Russian oil and gas. Algeria was going to increase the flow of gas through an existing pipeline, and the countries plan to build another pipeline.

Here were Italy’s calculations from a March 2022 piece from Hellenic Shipping News:

Italy consumed 29 billion cubic metres (bcm) of Russian gas last year, representing about 40% of its imports. It is gradually replacing around 10.5 bcm of that by increased imports from other countries starting from this winter, according to Eni.

Most of the extra gas will come from Algeria, which said on Sept. 21 it would increase total deliveries to Italy by nearly 20% to 25.2 bcm this year. This means it will become Italy’s top supplier, provide roughly 35% of imports; Russia’s share has meanwhile dropped to very low levels, Descalzi said this week.

The rest of the shortfall was to be made up of LNG shipments from Angola, Egypt, Mozambique, Qatar and of course the United States.

Rome was using billions of euros coming from the EU’s green fund, the REPowerEU plan, and the Covid recovery fund to completely wean itself off Russian gas and turn the country into a hub, mainly with LNG storage facilities. The government rushed through a 5 billion cubic meter capacity (bcm) LNG terminal project in Tuscany with the Draghi government appointing a special commissioner with near-absolute powers that allowed the project to proceed despite court challenges.

In December, Italy’s gas grid operator Snam completed a $400 million deal for another floating 5 bcm LNG storage and regasification facility that will be based on Italy’s northeastern coast, which will bring the country’s total to 28 bcm. In September of 2022, Reuters declared that the “energy crisis sires new European order: a strong Italy and ailing Germany.”

The Italian government patted itself on the back and said it was the “best in Europe” on energy security.

While gas made up about 51 percent of Italy’s total electricity generation in 2022 (the highest level in Europe), more than 95 percent of it was imported from overseas, and the problem was the math was overly optimistic going forward.

The Transmed system connecting Algeria and Italy wasn’t even operating at full capacity in 2022 when Italy began to believe it was going to be able to ramp up deliveries. There were major Algerian production issues, including infrastructure problems and the need to divert gas to meet increasing domestic demand for electricity.

Marco Giuli, a researcher at the Brussels School of Governance in Belgium, told Natural Gas Intelligence at the time that “the additional 9 Bcm from Algeria by 2023 is unrealistic, especially considering that Algerian supplies to Italy increased by 80% between 2020 and 2021, Giuli said.

Here we are in 2024 and Algeria’s gas exports to the EU have actually declined:



And the main reason Italy has been able to import as much gas as it has from Algeria is only because it was diverted from Spain due a spat over Madrid’s support for Morocco in a Western Sahara land dispute that angered Algiers.

Italy’s plans also didn’t take into account possible supply chain issues that have been shaking the shipping industry now for years.

That’s the thing about supplies through the pipelines between Russia and Europe; there’s a reason they were always described as cheap and reliable – at least up until the point states start blowing up pipelines, and nearly an entire continent’s worth of elected (and unelected) officials lose their minds.

The gap is often wide between those officials and the public, however, as is the case in Italy.

Italians and Russians enjoy longstanding ties. After World War Two the strong Communist party in Italy was a natural ally to the USSR, and Italian companies were some of the biggest traders with Russia during Soviet times. Since the breakup of the USSR, Russia and Italy remained strong business partners. For example, Italy shared manufacturing know-how, such as on civil aircraft and helicopter projects, as well as the modernization of rail transportation, and Russia had the energy. Many mid-sized Italian businesses were also eager to get into the emerging Russia market. Italians have never been as supportive of Project Ukraine as their northern neighbors, and the public is increasingly opposed to the country’s involvement in the war.

On January 22, La Repubblica released the results of a December poll that showed those against continuing to send military aid is now at 57 percent. Those in favor has dropped from 50 percent in April of 2022 to 47 percent in September of 2023 to 42 percent now. Other polls have found even less support.

In January, the Meloni government extended military aid to Kiev for another year.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/02 ... y-hub.html

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It Is Not Just Germany.

Pretty much all of EU (and US) economic statistics is a financial legerdemain and it is just the start of strangling of EU economy in earnest.


German Finance Minister Christian Lindner said that his country is getting poorer because of its failure to generate economic growth. Speaking at a Bloomberg event in Frankfurt on Monday, the leader of the market-friendly Free Democrats acknowledged that it’s hard to avoid the implications of an extended period of little or no expansion.“We are no longer competitive,” he said. “We are getting poorer because we have no growth. We are falling behind.” Lindner’s remarks highlight the predicament faced by Europe’s biggest economy as it enters a second post-pandemic year when expansion is anticipated to turn out feeble at best.

Germany has been hit harder simply because the US views her as a main competitor in EU and as a "locomotive" of EU's economy. Locomotive being a misnomer, of course, more like a handcar. Again, it is the globalist model which is in a free fall. And don't let me started on Military-Industrial Complex of Europe. Good luck with new tanks, combat aircraft and other things. F-35 for everyone)) Rafale? Forget it--it begins to near obsolescence plus France cannot produce enough on time. So, yeah, now it seems that whatever is being left of 404 is being "given" as a "gift" to EU by the US--let EU taxpayer foot the bill for keeping this quasi-country afloat... for now. LOL. Recall, I warned about it...

http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2024/02 ... rmany.html

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The Kremlin Spokesman Is Right: The EU Needs The Image Of Russia As An Enemy



ANDREW KORYBKO
FEB 7, 2024

The US exploited this perception to reassert its hegemony over Europe, after which it designated Germany as its “Lead From Behind” partner for containing Russia there on its behalf via the “military Schengen” and the “Baltic Defense Line”.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a popular Russian journalist that “They [politicians in EU countries] need to continue to construct an image of the enemy, to do it in a textured, prominent way, in order to justify the increase in spending. And, you see, the allocation of 50 billion – on the one hand, for the EU this amount is not a very big deal, but on the other hand it is still noticeable against the backdrop of the crisis markers manifesting themselves in the economies of EU countries.”

His comments came after the bloc resolved its prior impasse with Hungary to allocate €50 billion in funding for Ukraine over the next four years, but the larger context concerns the US’ reassertion of hegemony over the EU and last week’s agreement to partially implement the “military Schengen”. This confluence of events explains why the EU needs the image of Russia as an enemy in order for Germany to continue rebuilding “Fortress Europe” and a new “Iron Curtain” along the “Baltic Defense Line”:

* 28 December 2022: “The Five Ways That The US Successfully Reasserted Its Hegemony Over Europe In 2022”

* 24 November 2023: “NATO’s Proposed ‘Military Schengen’ Is A Thinly Disguised German Power Play Over Poland”

* 19 January 2024: “Germany Is Rebuilding ‘Fortress Europe’ To Assist The US’ ‘Pivot (Back) To Asia’”

* 22 January 2024: “The ‘Baltic Defense Line’ Is Meant To Accelerate The German-Led ‘Military Schengen’”

* 6 February 2024: “Poland Is Scaremongering About War With Russia To Justify Subordinating Itself To Germany”

The analyses enumerated above describe the military-strategic dynamics in detail for those readers who are interested in learning more about them, but casual observers just need to know that these processes are driven first and foremost by the perception of Russia as an enemy. The US exploited that to reassert its hegemony over Europe, after which it designated Germany as its “Lead From Behind” partner for containing Russia there on its behalf via the “military Schengen” and the “Baltic Defense Line”.

This will eventually free up American forces for their redeployment to the Asia-Pacific ahead of the Sino-US dimension of the New Cold War heating up more later this decade. As with Europe, the same process that the US just perfected with Russia and the EU will be emulated with China and its neighbors in Asia, with the end result being that the Sino-Russo Entente will be falsely framed as an existential threat. The purpose in doing so is to rally America’s Eurasian vassals around its leadership for containing those two.

https://korybko.substack.com/p/the-krem ... -right-the

Analyzing The Mediterranean Corridor’s Provisionally Planned Extension To Lvov



ANDREW KORYBKO
FEB 7, 2024

The case can be made that the Mediterranean Corridor’s provisionally planned extension to Lvov is a pilot project that doesn’t presage the bloc’s intent to prepare for relocating the Ukrainian capital to there like Medvedev predicted on Twitter.

Deputy Chair of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev drew global attention to the Mediterranean Corridor’s provisionally planned extension to Lvov in his tweet on Monday, which speculated that this will presage the creation of a rump Ukraine with its capital in that western city. The EU reportedly agreed to finance this rail project up until that city instead of to Kiev, including through the construction of European-compataible gauge tracks, thus giving rise to rumors of their intent.

Medvedev wryly concluded his tweet by writing that “the point here is not that the tracks in the West and Malorossiya differ in width. It's just that business is a lot more prescient than politicians”, but the argument can just as plausibly be made that business is also more averse to political risks. It might not be that they don’t expect Kiev to remain the capital of Ukraine, which former Pentagon official Stephen Bryen reported last month could be moved to Lvov, but that this expansion is simply a pilot project.

To explain, while that corridor would nevertheless complement Lvov’s political role in the abovementioned scenario, it could very well be that Brussels feels more comfortable seeing how quickly it could be built and how profitable it’ll be for everyone before committing to extending it to Kiev. After all, it’s already unprecedented enough that the EU reportedly reached a provisional agreement to finance this route’s extension into a non-member state, so it makes sense that they’d play it cautiously.

Ukraine is still a warzone too and a lot of the bombing that Russia has carried out against military targets over this time has been in the regions east of the erstwhile Austrian-Hungarian Empire’s former lands. Committing a massive amount of funds for building a railway closer towards the areas that have been directly affected by this ongoing conflict, especially the capital itself, could rightly be criticized by some European Parliamentarians as a reckless gamble that risks wasting resources on a “white elephant”.

Proceeding cautiously by approving a pilot project for extending this corridor to Lvov, however, could reduce resistance to this initiative and possibly prove its viability, some years after which it could then be extended to Kiev once the conflict inevitably ends. The intent is almost certainly not what Medvedev assessed it to be even if it ultimately serves that role in the scenario that Bryen reported since the North Sea-Baltic Corridor would have been prioritized over the Mediterranean one in that case.

This project connects the Low Countries with Germany, Poland, and the Baltics, and the summer 2022 proposal for extending it into Ukraine could have been approved instead if the bloc envisaged it playing the aforesaid role in a much smaller rump state than the one at present. As a case in point, Poland is already slyly taking control of Western Ukraine through economic means, and the return of German-backed Donald Tusk to the premiership could see Ukraine’s wealth siphoned to Berlin via Warsaw.

Poland just subordinated itself to German hegemony by agreeing to the partial implementation of the “miliary Schengen” for optimizing the movement of troops and equipment between those two and the Netherlands in what’ll be the first time since World War II that Germany has been able to do so. One-third of a year ago, Poland’s former government also accused Germany of cutting a deal with Ukraine behind its back, so the stage is set for Germany to expand its economic influence there.

Prior to the recent report about the EU’s provisional agreement to fund the Mediterranean Corridor’s extension to Lvov, one could have therefore predicted that they’d fund the North Sea-Baltic one’s instead, but that didn’t happen despite it making the most sense for the bloc’s de facto German leader. It’s unclear what accounts for this inexplicable decision, but it nevertheless serves as a powerful counterpoint to Medvedev’s assessment of the EU’s grand strategic intentions in this case.

Putting everything the together, the case can thus compellingly be made that the Mediterranean Corridor’s provisionally planned extension to Lvov is a pilot project that doesn’t presage the bloc’s intent to prepare for relocating the Ukrainian capital to there, even though this scenario could still transpire. Medvedev’s take wasn’t wrong per se since there’s a cogent logic behind what he wrote, but considering the facts that were shared in this piece, it appears to be more akin to wishful thinking than anything else.

https://korybko.substack.com/p/analyzin ... -corridors

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Protests in Europe Could Lead to a Major Social Crisis

Lucas Leiroz

February 6, 2024

The insistence of European governments in ignoring farmers’ demands tends to generate serious problems and destabilize the bloc.

The current protests in Europe are leading several countries to a serious social crisis. European governments remain unwilling to meeting the demands of peasants and farmers, generating an escalation in demonstrations and concerns about the stability of the EU in the near future.

Rural workers demand the creation of protective mechanisms for domestic production, reducing the import of agricultural items, as well as changes in “green” policies that strongly harm producers. Protests have been ongoing since January, with thousands of farmers taking to the streets in countries such as France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Poland, Romania and the Netherlands – as well as smaller demonstrations in some other states.

There is a number of factors that need to be understood in order to properly analyze the current crisis. Firstly, it is necessary to remember that the European agricultural sector is traditionally more fragile than other economic segments, such as industry and finance. Local farmers are in a disadvantaged position in relation to the major food producing powers outside Western Europe. For this reason, the sector has always been heavily dependent on state incentives to remain active, guaranteeing stability and profits for farmers.

However, European states are failing to fulfill their duty as agricultural sponsors. Since the beginning of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, the EU has suffered from the side effects of the imposition of illegal sanctions against Moscow, as trade of Russian energy and fertilizers has been banned. In addition, to help the neo-Nazi regime, the EU began to massively import Ukrainian agricultural products, virtually destroying the internal agribusiness of Western-European states.

The uncontrolled entry of low-cost Ukrainian grains into European countries caused domestic food production to collapse. EU states simply stopped helping their own farmers to support Ukraine. The most affected were the countries bordering Ukraine, which is why Romania, Poland and Hungary have already sanctioned the import of Ukrainian grains. However, in many other European countries the authorities continue to refuse to prevent the entry of Ukrainian grains, which is upsetting local farmers and leading them to demonstrate.

To make the situation even worse, the EU imposes several restrictive agricultural production standards on its own farmers, following the radical environmentalist guidelines of the so-called “green agenda”. Not by chance, one of the protesters’ main demands is the end of cuts in state subsidies for fuel. European governments want to prevent the agricultural sector from emitting polluting gases with its production and transport machinery, making farmers “pay the bill” for climate change.

In other words, a mixture of factors, from anti-Russian warmongering to ecological radicalism, is fueling the current crisis in Europe. Farmers are tired of being neglected by their own governments and have decided to protest in search of improvements in their living and working conditions. This is part of a growing dissatisfaction among ordinary people in the Western world with the way their governments are dealing with current global issues.

Western governments want their citizens to commit to agendas that are definitely unpopular. There is no rational argument that could convince a rural producer that it is a “good thing” to have his agricultural items rejected on the market just to help Ukraine. The EU’s “solidarity” with Kiev cannot be a reason to harm the European population itself. In the same sense, it is absolutely illogical to blame farmers for environmental problems, since almost all economic activities generate some type of impact on nature, with agribusiness not being the only “rival” of the environment.

European governments need to start acting with rationality, parsimony, and strategic sense if they really want to prevent an escalation of the crisis. Protests tend to have a major impact, not only because they paralyze agricultural production, but also because they fuel social polarization in Europe. It is possible that other sectors will begin to join the demonstrations, as many of them are also affected by the same problems. The industrial sector, for example, is one of the most impacted by pro-Ukrainian policies and the green agenda, which is why demonstrations and strikes could happen in the near future. In practice, the rural uprising can be an encouraging factor for a widespread popular mobilization demanding political reforms throughout Europe.

The path to be followed by European authorities to avoid a massive crisis is very simple. It is necessary for European governments to just start acting sovereignly, prioritizing their own interests and the well-being of their population, ignoring imported agendas like Ukraine and green ideology. The EU’s commitment must be to the European people and not to NATO’s war plans or the ecological utopias of globalist elites.

By following a sovereigntist path, Europe could avoid worsening the crisis. It remains to be seen whether current European politicians are really willing to stop serving foreign interests.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... al-crisis/

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Senator JD Vance Put Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk In His Place



ANDREW KORYBKO
FEB 9, 2024

This German-backed liberal-globalist tyrant never expected that he’d be reminded of the fact that a clear hierarchy exists in Polish-US relations and exposed for trying to distract from his domestic political crisis that disgusts half of America.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk tried shaming the Republicans for attempting to block another tranche of aid for Ukraine in a tweet on Thursday. He wrote: “Dear Republican Senators of America. Ronald Reagan, who helped millions of us to win back our freedom and independence, must be turning in his grave today. Shame on you.” His undiplomatic meddling in that country’s domestic affairs wasn’t left unanswered, however, since Senator JD Vance promptly put him in his place.

The latter responded on X as follows: “The new leader of Poland is arresting political opponents and owes his country’s security to the generosity of mine. He might consider showing some appreciation, or at least toning down his own authoritarian impulses.” Senator Vance had earlier slammed Tusk’s attacks on press freedom after his German-backed liberal-globalist regime seized control of public media on legally dubious pretexts that the conservative-nationalist opposition sharply condemned.

Poland plunged into its worst political crisis since the 1980s as a result of that development and the regime’s subsequent arrest of two lawmakers on equally dubious legal pretexts who’ve since been released after President Andrzej Duda, who’s allied with the former government, pardoned them. Tusk has sought to distract from all of this by appealing to patriots to support Ukraine since mid-January, with his Defense Minister recently scaremongering about war with Russia for similar narrative purposes.

This domestic backdrop, which has also served to divert attention from Poland’s subordination to Germany via the recent pact on partially implementing a “military Schengen” that was described in the preceding hyperlinked analysis, explains why Tusk provoked an international scandal with his tweet. Senator Vance is keenly aware of how the liberal-globalists operate after fighting against them inside of Congress, however, which is why he directly called him out and thus exposed his ulterior motives.

He also reminded Tusk that the same security that he’s harping on so much nowadays for the abovementioned reasons is directly dependent on America’s military generosity. It was therefore extremely ungrateful of him to meddle in America’s domestic affairs, though US Ambassador Mark Brzezinski is unlikely to protest this undiplomatic intervention since he supports both Tusk and Zelensky. In any case, Senator Vance’s words reverberated widely on social media and generated a lot of attention.

His fellow conservative-nationalist Americans and their political allies in Poland among the former-government-turned-opposition enthusiastically endorsed his slap-down of that liberal-globalist leader. After all, he’s one of the only foreign politicians to speak truth to power in exposing the authoritarian takeover of Polish society by this German-backed tyrant, though he might not be the last if his example serves to inspire others at home and abroad to speak up as well.

The takeaway from this scandal is that Tusk’s narrative ploy backfired because he thought that he’d shame the Republicans into sacrificing their country’s objective national interests in congressional negotiations only for one of the loudest proponents of the America First movement to put him in place. He never expected that he’d be reminded of the fact that a clear hierarchy exists in Polish-US relations and exposed for trying to distract from his domestic political crisis that disgusts half of America.

https://korybko.substack.com/p/senator- ... lish-prime

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Europe: the peasants’ revolt

What is at the root of the crisis in European farming?
Proletarian writers

Friday 9 February 2024


French farmers have been blocking the major roads to Paris, reminding the government in Paris of their ability to starve the city if their problems continue to be ignored. But no one in Paris or in Brussels has the ability to get to the root of the problem, which lies in the global crisis of overproduction and the uncontrollable workings of the global market.

The agricultural crisis that has driven European farmers back onto the war path was never supposed to happen. Back in the booming 1960s, when the common agricultural policy (CAP) was first adopted by the European Union, the promise of a managed, Europe-wide free trade area within which all members could flourish (meanwhile structuring relations with non-member nations to the permanent advantage of the EU) seemed like the dawning of a golden age for European farmers.

Whilst the postwar Keynesian social compact (aka the welfare state deal for social peace) served to distract workers from thoughts of revolution, the EU dream of a modernised countryside (with food sovereignty at home and economic relations with the rest of the world permanently skewed in favour of member states) likewise served to distract attention away from the contradictions that plagued this flawed utopia from the outset.

In a sense, the CAP was conceived as a kind of welfare state for the peasantry. The deal that was done to stabilise European agriculture after the last world war, helped by the establishment of the CAP system of subsidies, taxes and exemptions, was intended to regularise the agricultural sector, resolving any trade frictions between fellow EU member states and protecting the sector from competition from the world market.

In practice, however, there has never been equal status between EU members, either economically or politically, and the economies that have benefited most have always been those of the dominant imperialist economies (and of those who most obsequiously tag along).

Now that global capitalist economic crisis is coming back full blast, it is the small and medium farming operations that are going to the wall and the vast agribusinesses that are surviving. The number of farms in the EU has shrunk by over a third since 2005, while even the surviving agribusiness giants are saddled with high levels of debt, demonstrating less the survival of the fittest than the survival of the most moribund.

Even the largest concerns, when exposed to global market forces, prove to be operating on very narrow profit margins.

One obvious contradiction arose from the mismatch in the EU between those economies in which agriculture played a key role and those in which it played a lesser one. Whilst under socialism such disparities can be (and in the Soviet Union, were) understood and planned for as a necessary phase in the long-term road to overcoming the contradiction between town and country, this could never be the case under capitalism for any length of time, based as it is upon competition not cooperation.

The big imperialist member states of the EU regard the economies of the less industrialised as a handy sponge to mop up excess production when the crisis of overproduction threatens glut, and as easy prey for loan traps which further impoverish the unwary or desperate. On the other hand, farmers can draw some consolation from the fact that, thanks to the CAP and its complicated and ever-shifting pattern of subsidies, taxes, exemptions and quotas, the market has for decades been rigged in such a way as to protect members’ economies from the full rigours of a global free market.

At least, that was the plan. But with the crisis of overproduction becoming really acute, exacerbated by blowback from the self-defeating sanctions war on Russia, the conflicting interests of rival nations rise to the surface, overturning all the high-minded intentions of cooperation and mutual aid signed up to in happier times.

With right-wing eurosceptic populism a growing challenge in the coming EU elections, thanks to the inability of anyone else on the bourgeois political spectrum to offer a really plausible way out of the crisis, west European leaders are busting a gut trying to contain or divert the outpouring of wrath from small and medium-sized agricultural producers lest the river should break its bounds.

French president Emmanuel Macron is currently trying to curry favour with farmers by posing as their champion in dragging his feet over signing up to a provisionally agreed EU alliance with the Mercosur group of Latin American countries which, farmers fear, could flood the European market with cheap produce. Macron is trying to square the circle by promising to defend France’s subsidised “food sovereignty” but without undermining CAP policy.

Naturally, he is couching this all in culture wars rhetoric, casting himself as a champion defending pure “European standards” against the import of dodgy chickens from Latinos. What he ‘forgets’ to mention is that monopoly capitalism would be sunk (and Macron would be out of a job tomorrow) if low-wage, substandard economies were no longer freely available for imperialism to superexploit.

Imperialism needs low-wage economies with disgusting working conditions to prey upon.

It is no accident that French peasants are particularly militant. France combines a fully developed industry with a still large and influential agricultural base, the latter being a crucial recipient of CAP largesse. But the pitchforks are not just out in France. Indeed, it was fiery German protests against cutting diesel fuel subsidies that kicked off the present tsunami of protests across Europe.

“Macron’s comments come as farmers in France protest about rising costs, falling profits and new regulations as Brussels tries to cut carbon emissions and improve biodiversity. Similar protests are also starting in Belgium, where farmers on Tuesday moved to block a crucial port, while German farmers have also blocked motorways and prevented a minister from disembarking a ferry.

“Among farmers’ grievances are local and EU regulations, while in France, Poland, Slovakia and Romania, they have also objected to cheaper imports from Ukraine flooding their markets. After the Russian full-scale invasion in 2022, the EU agreed to lift tariffs on Ukrainian grain and produce, which have lower production costs and do not have to follow EU standards.

“On the issue of agricultural imports from Ukraine, another irritant for farmers, Macron said he would raise it at the summit as well because they were ‘destabilising the European market’ for chicken and eggs. The commission has bowed to demands to add quotas on eggs, poultry meat and sugar.” (France turns up heat on Brussels to address farmer protests by Leila Abboud, Andy Bounds and Alice Hancock, Financial Times, 30 January 2024)

The farmers’ rage has been sparked by multiple provocations: rising energy bills, rampant inflation, soaring prices, green austerity measures, the tax-free import of Ukrainian grain and the boomerang effect of sanctions against Russia, to name but a few. All of these are secondary causes, driven on at base by the deepening crisis of overproduction and European farmers’ increasing exposure to the untrammelled forces of the global marketplace.

There is no future for small farming under capitalism. Their future lies in socialism.

https://thecommunists.org/2024/02/09/ne ... ny-famers/

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Tractors Blockade Europe: What are the Reasons for the Protest?
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on FEBRUARY 9, 2024
Yoselina Guevara López



Thousands of tractors occupy the streets of major cities across Europe, showing their anger and discomfort with the policies of the governments that are part of the European Union. They are demonstrations that began in the fall of 2023, but during the month of January and February 2024 have spread strongly throughout the old continent, setting fire to the headquarters of the European Parliament in Brussels, but also threatening to reach the stage of the Italian Song Festival in San Remo.

Farmers’ grievances vary from country to country, ranging from German protests against cuts in diesel subsidies to French protests against free trade agreements. Farm workers are also united by common problems, such as rising energy and input prices, coupled with the growing gap between the profit margins of small farmers and the big agribusiness giants and supermarket chains. It is no coincidence that among the targets of the protests, in addition to the nerve centers of world politics, are also the headquarters of several agribusiness giants, in front of which the striking farmers have thrown large loads of manure.

Opportunity for the fossil lobby and the far right

The tractor demonstrations of the last few months are unwittingly playing into the hands of parties opposed to decarbonization and the so-called “fossil lobby” within the EU. Let us not forget that in June 2024 the European Parliament elections will be held. The political move is complex to understand; at first the farmers’ indignation found its voice and sounding board on the left, because it was mainly aimed against free trade agreements and multinationals. But this time it is trying to focus attention on the opposition to the policies of the European Union that are spearheaded by the attack on the Green Deal (Green Pact), with its strategies “From Farm to Fork” and “Biodiversity 2030”; this direction is being driven by the right and extreme right parties determined to overthrow the majority that supports the “green lobby” of the European Parliament.

In this sense, the main problem lies in the fact that European policies, designed to protect the planet, are devoid of measures that could help farmers to face the serious economic difficulties they are going through and at the same time allow them to accelerate the ecological transition of the agricultural sector, victim and executioner of the climate crisis. This is not to say, however, that we should not be on the sidelines of environmentally sustainable measures in agriculture, because this would mean the end of all agricultural activity in the coming decades.

The climate crisis is growing at an accelerated pace, as we see every day with weather phenomena worldwide; but the great challenge begins by taking into account the demands of the rural production sector and at the same time creating a model of agriculture capable of implementing the ecological transition, designed to strongly support the costs and income of farmers, which will allow them to produce truly healthy food for consumers.

In defense of farmers

The agricultural sector accounts for only 11% of the European Union’s greenhouse gas emissions, yet it is the first to pay the price of extreme weather events due to climate change, which have increasingly affected production in recent years. Many farm workers are forced to change crops due to prolonged periods of drought, while others, who would like to preserve traditional crops, are calling for new reservoirs and water harvesting infrastructure that governments do not always prioritize.

Since 2005, more than a third of farms in the European Union have closed their doors, in a scenario in which more and more transnational giants are emerging and smaller companies are becoming less and less competitive. In general terms, farmers feel harassed by a bureaucracy from the EU to national governments that know little or nothing about production costs and the hard work of farming. But the farming sector also lives under the demand to produce more food cheaply while respecting the climate and the environment; therefore they argue that green policies, as they are currently conceived, are unfair, economically unsustainable and will eventually prove to be self-destructive.

European Commission’s re-launching of green policies

From the European Commission, with its current president Ursula Von der Leyen, they have given the green light by announcing in early February the withdrawal of the controversial European Pesticides Act, Regulation South (Sustainable Use of Pesticides), which had already been rejected in November 2023 by the European Parliament, and which imposed a drastic reduction in the use of plant protection products and pesticides.

Undoubtedly an achievement of the tractor protests but nevertheless, we must responsibly insist on pointing out that the Green Deal or Green Pact of the European Union is not the enemy, the real problem lies in the low income of the majority of small and medium agricultural producers. In fact, according to data from the Matthews Analysis Company, during the year 2022, 94% of EU financial aid will end up in the hands of the richest agricultural producers, while only 6% of the money will be distributed to the poorest farmers. Once again, a small group benefits to the detriment of the great majorities, a logic that we know perfectly well to which ideology it belongs and which have been the negative consequences it has brought to all mankind.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/02/ ... e-protest/

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Why’d Putin Spend So Much Time Talking About Poland In His Interview With Tucker?



ANDREW KORYBKO
FEB 10, 2024

It's impossible for anyone to have a solid understanding of current events and the historical processes that gave rise to them without learning about Poland’s inextricable role in both. The past laid the basis upon which present developments are unfolding since modern-day Ukrainian identity wouldn’t have taken shape nor would the ongoing proxy war have unfolded without Poland’s participation.

President Putin’s interview with Tucker Carlson, in which he subverted both the Mainstream Media and Alt-Media Community’s expectations as explained here, devoted considerable time to Poland. Casual observers outside might have been confused by the Russian leader’s decision to talk so much about that country. Their extent of knowledge about it is limited to common facts about its history and modern-day pro-American anti-Russian geopolitical disposition but that’s about as far as it goes for most folks.

The reality is that Poland is inextricably connected with what can be described as the ‘Ukrainian Question’, which pertains to the identity of those who live on the territory of that country. President Putin knew that his audience is largely unaware of this history and that’s why he spent so much time explaining it to them. This wasn’t just because he’s fascinated with these facts, as proven by his summer 2021 magnum opus on the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians, but due to it being relevant today.

It's precisely due to Poland having controlled a lot of what’s nowadays called Ukraine, which the Poles themselves were the first to name during the Commonwealth’s time with reference to the borderlands as President Putin reminded everyone, that it plays such a role in the current conflict. Not only do some of the policymaking elites consider it part of their erstwhile geographically broad civilization, a large part of which was built on the lands of the former Kievan Rus, but they also consider them kindred peoples.

That’s not to suggest that Ukrainians were fairly treated at the time, however, since it the result of their systematic mistreatment over the centuries and associated curtailment of their religious rights that one of their historical heroes asked the Tsar to take control of these lands in order to liberate his people. Under Catherine the Great, Russia eventually regained control of all its lost lands from the Kievan Rus era with the exception of the westernmost ones that fell under Austria’s control after the partitions.

The end of World War I and the Polish-Soviet War that arose from its aftermath saw Warsaw and Moscow partition what’s nowadays known as Ukraine between themselves, but the USSR ultimately obtained its neighbor’s half after World War II and thus finally reunited all of Kiev Rus. About that global conflict, President Putin informed Tucker that the failure of Polish diplomacy played a major role in catalyzing it, which most Poles deny but is nevertheless a compelling interpretation of events.

Between the two World Wars, the communists’ ideology inspired them to accelerate the creation of a separate Ukrainian identity built upon a combination of past indigenous efforts as well as Polish and Austrian ones, which culminated in the creation of its own Soviet Republic. The borders were adjusted twice after World War II and then were inherited after the USSR’s dissolution, thus making them completely artificial, though that doesn’t mean that the Ukrainian identity itself doesn’t veritably exist.

The problem is that its post-communist nationalism was formed by the Western-encouraged nostalgia that some elites and members of civil society have of the Nazi-era past when Ukrainians who lived under the interwar Second Polish Republic collaborated with the fascists to genocide Poles, Jews, and Russians. It’s this identity that’s artificially manufactured and hateful to the core, which Russia rightly regards as abominable and a threat to its security interests, ergo the denazification goal of the special operation.

Circling back to Poland, its historical ties with the people of what’s nowadays the country of Ukraine pushed it to play a leading role in NATO’s proxy war on Russia through that former Soviet Republic, which took the form of facilitating military aid (not to mention dispatching its own) and sending mercenaries. President Putin even told Tucker that Poles comprise the largest number of foreign fighters in that country followed by Americans and then Georgians.

He didn’t say so directly, but the subtext that’s clearly discernable in the Russian leader’s review of Polish-Ukrainian relations suggests that Warsaw is driven by its own interwar nostalgia for its lost eastern regions (“Kresy”), hence why it might be playing this role in order to (re)build a sphere of influence. At the same time, however, President Putin also noted how “Poland pecks from the German hand” since “Germany feeds Poland to a certain extent” via EU funds that Berlin contributes to more than others.

Even so, the relationship between those two is a curious one since he made this remark in the context of talking about how Poland shut off Russian gas transit via its territory to Germany, thus prompting him to question why Berlin doesn’t hold these funds as a Damocles’ sword over Warsaw’s end in order to force a resumption of imports. He also criticized Poland for hyping up an imaginary Russian threat and explicitly said that Russia will only attack Poland if it’s attacked first.

In the grand scheme of things, Poland is the country that few outside of Russia ever discuss when it comes to the ‘Ukrainian Question’, both in terms of that former Soviet Republic’s identity as well as the ongoing NATO-Russian proxy war that’s being fought within its pre-2014 borders. Warsaw’s nostalgia for its interwar control over what’s nowadays’ Western Ukraine as well as its earlier control over a swath of that modern country during the Commonwealth era is why it plays a leading role in this conflict.

Prior to the special operation, the Polish intelligentsia were the first external actors to plant the seeds of Ukrainian identity into its people’s minds, which they did as a means of legitimizing their control over the former lands of Kievan Rus whose people’s ethno-religious identity was different than their own. As President Putin explained, Warsaw’s meddling played a major part in the events that later gave rise to some of its own people’s self-proclaimed separate identity that others then exploited for their own ends.

It's therefore impossible for anyone to have a solid understanding of current events and the historical processes that gave rise to them without learning about Poland’s inextricable role in both. The past laid the basis upon which present developments are unfolding since modern-day Ukrainian identity wouldn’t have taken shape nor would the ongoing proxy war have unfolded without Poland’s participation. These facts suggest that peace isn’t possible without Poland playing some sort of role in this process as well.

https://korybko.substack.com/p/whyd-put ... me-talking

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Left groups in Italy demand safe return of anti-fascist activist imprisoned in Hungary

Italian school teacher Ilaria Salis has been imprisoned in Hungary for nearly a year, accused of assaulting neo-Nazis during an anti-fascist counter protest

February 09, 2024 by Peoples Dispatch


Ilara Salis (chained up) presented at Hungarian court. Photo: FGC

Leftist groups in Italy demanded the Italian government take concrete steps to ensure the safety of Ilaria Salis, an Italian anti-fascist activist who has been incarcerated in Hungary for almost a year. The 39-year-old school teacher was arrested on February 11, 2023 and is facing three counts of attempted assault and is also accused of being part of an extreme leftwing organization. She was arrested after an anti-fascist counter demonstration to a neo-Nazi rally in Budapest in 2023.

Salis was produced before the trial court in Hungary on January 29 in handcuffs and shackles which triggered widespread outrage in Italy and across Europe. Days later, on January 31, Italian newspaper Repubblica published a letter written by Salis in October 2023 denouncing the inhumane treatment and appalling conditions she has been subjected to during her nearly one-year stint in Hungarian prison.

In the letter she wrote that she was denied contact with her family for the first six months and throughout her time in prison she has systematically been denied translation and interpretation services by authorities for key aspects of her legal process. She was also denied access to Hungarian classes. She has also been denied proper access to medical care. With regards to her physical conditions, she described dirty cramped quarters teaming with mice, cockroaches, and bed bugs and only being permitted one hour outside her cell a day.

Groups such as the People’s Union (UP), Communist Refoundation Party (PRC) Potere al Popolo, Communist Youth Front (FGC), Italian Communist Party (PCI), and others, have expressed solidarity with Ilaria Salis and condemned her treatment by Hungarian authorities. They have also condemned the callousness of the far-right Giorgia Meloni-led Italian government for not providing necessary support to Salis. The groups have demanded the Italian government take immediate action to bring her back to Italy.

In response to international and domestic pressure, even from non-left opposition parties like the Five Star Movement, Meloni called far-right Hungarian leader Viktor Orban on January 30, a day after the photos circulated of Salis wearing shackles in court, and urged him to intervene in the case on behalf of the Italian citizen to uphold her basic rights. Meanwhile, Italy’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Antonio Tajani dismissed the pressure on the government and stated that a legal case should not turn into a political spectacle. Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini even criticized Illaria Salis for participating in an anti-fascist rally that countered the neo-Nazi ‘Day of Honor in Budapest on February 11, 2023.

On February 9, a representative from Potere al Popolo told Peoples Dispatch, that “Ilaria Salis has been held in a Hungarian maximum-security prison for nearly a year, has been subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment, and faces a 24-year prison sentence. Her rights of defense and due process have been severely compromised and her prison conditions do not meet minimum standards of legality.”

They continued: “The Italian government and diplomatic authorities have intervened late and not incisively enough. We ask that Salis, who has pleaded innocence and is awaiting trial, be released or, at the very least, placed under house arrest in Italy, a possibility provided for by European law but which, to date, still seems far off.”

Potere al Popolo and the Communist Youth Front (FGC) have criticized the hypocrisy of Antonio Tajani who has called for legal resolution of Ilaria Salis’s case as it was Tajani who even asked the EU to terminate trade relations with India following an incident in February 2012 when two Italian marines who were detained in India for shooting two Indian fishermen in February 2012.

Anti-fascism is not a crime
Salis’ arrest took place amid the fascist-organized “Honor Day” commemoration in February 2023. Neo-Nazi groups from Hungary and other parts of Europe gather annually in Budapest in the second week of February for “Honor Day” which commemorates the Nazis who were killed during the Siege of Budapest by the Soviet Army in 1945.

Parallel to the neo-Nazi commemoration, anti-fascist groups in Hungary and abroad also gather in the city to organize counter-demonstrations against fascism and the attempts to rewrite history and celebrate Nazis. Progressives in Hungary have accused the Viktor Orban government and police authorities of covertly supporting such neo-Nazi events that glorify Nazi war criminals and their collaborators.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/02/09/ ... n-hungary/