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Tucker Talks Taboos After MSM Ignores Instagram Kiddie-Porn Bombshell

Posted by M. C. on June 9, 2023

Instagram is owned by…

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/tucker-talks-taboos-after-msm-ignores-instagram-kiddie-porn-bombshell

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BY TYLER DURDEN

After his first episode topped 100 million views, Tucker Carlson is back with Episode 2, exploring how we, as a population, are controlled (or coerced) directly (through laws) or indirectly (through taboos).

Carlson observes the changing societal taboos in America, suggesting that they are being dictated from above rather than evolving organically, focusing explicitly on the shift in attitudes towards race-based attacks, adultery in politics, and child molestation.

“Let’s say you wanted to control a country,” the former Fox News man begins rather joltingly.

“Well,” he explains “you’d want to make sure you had the complete obedience of everybody within your borders who was authorized to use deadly force… you’d start with the military… [and other agencies] like the IRS.”

“Controlling the guns would be a top priority for you if ever wanted to go dictatorial.”

But, Carlson, asks, what if you wanted more, not simply to control people’s behavior, “but to control how they think.”

“In that case,” he remarks, “you’d need to take charge of its taboos.”

A taboo is something that by popular consensus is not allowed, it is not illegal, but it doesn’t need to be.

“Over time, social prohibitions are more powerful and more enduring than laws.”

Until fairly recently, Tucker points out that it was taboo in this country to attack people on the basis of their race, but he notes “apparently we no longer believe that – punishing people on the basis of their skin color is not only permitted in modern America, it is mandatory… as long as the victims are white.”

Carlson questions the definition and scope of white supremacy as described by President Joe Biden…

https://players.brightcove.net/1155968404/r1WF6V0Pl_default/index.html?videoId=6327442810112

Which brings Carlson to this week’s horrific WSJ expose of Instagram’s kiddie-porn rings which he notes has resulted in exactly nothing as “one of the largest circulation newspapers in the world reported that one of the world’s most influential companies was promoting pedophilia and nobody in power did anything about it.”

As Carlson notes, “The people who run this country no longer see child molesters as the worst among us”

He expresses concerns about the blurred lines of crime, the erosion of defined legal codes, and the need to protect societal taboos as guiding moral principles.

In fact, he continues, “what we are allowed to dislike is being dictated to us from above, sometimes by force.”

The trick, that has happened slowly and then all at one, is that “when a crime has no definition, anyone can be guilty of it”

“Don’t let them rationalize away your intuitive moral sense.”

“Cling to your taboos like you life depends on them… because it does.”

See the rest here

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A Wealth Tax Reality Check

Posted by M. C. on June 9, 2023

However, the Tax Foundation3 found that in 2020 (the latest year of data), the top 1% of taxpayers received 22.2% of taxable income and paid an average tax rate of 26.0%.

Policy makers must remember that while much wealth takes the historical form, buildings and heavy machinery, considerable contemporary wealth comes in digitized ideas, which can be sent across the globe at the touch of a few computer keystrokes and at the speed of light. In short, added taxes on “extreme wealthy” Americans can unavoidably impair the economic futures of non-wealthy Americans.

A Wealth Tax Reality Check

By Richard B. McKenzie

At every opportunity, President Joe Biden has pressed a central tenet of his social agenda: “Extremely wealthy Americans don’t pay their fair share of federal income taxes” (emphasis added). By Internal Revenue Service definitions of income, top income earners generally pay a far greater federal income-tax share than do lower income groups. Without saying so, the President has greatly expanded wealthy Americans’ income to include their considerable unrealized capital gains, dramatically lowering their income-tax rate, which he uses to advance his wealth-tax case. To initiate wealth taxation, Biden proposes a “minimum billionaires tax,” under which wealthy Americans will pay at least 20% of their “total income”—including unrealized capital gains—in federal income taxes.1 A sizable majority (59%) of diverse Americans2 also favored a wealth tax in 2022.

Political support for a wealth tax appears to be built on two incorrect presumptions: First, wealthy Americans pay precious little income taxes (conventionally defined). Second, workers’ “income” and the wealthy’s “capital gains” are conceptually the same. As explained, given the economics of wealth accumulation, the wealthy (especially those self-made) should be celebrated, not denigrated, because of the resulting far greater gains provided non-wealthy Americans.

The Wealthy’s “Low” Tax Rates?

President Biden stresses that extremely wealthy Americans pay a meager 8% income-tax rate, giving the impression that he’s using IRS definitions. However, the Tax Foundation3 found that in 2020 (the latest year of data), the top 1% of taxpayers received 22.2% of taxable income and paid an average tax rate of 26.0%. The top half of taxpayers, who received almost 90% of taxable income, paid an average tax rate of 14.8%. The bottom half received 10.2% of taxable income and paid an average tax rate of 3.1% (with many paying nothing). In short, the top 1% of taxpayers received 2.2 times the income share of the bottom half but paid an average income-tax rate 8.4 times the tax rate of the bottom half.

The Tax Foundation also found that the top 1% in 2020 paid 42.3% of all federal income taxes, or 18 times the share of the bottom half, which was 2.3%. The top 10% of taxpayers received almost half the total income but paid almost three-quarters of all income taxes. Moreover, the income-tax share paid by the top income groups has risen substantially since 1980, while the share of the bottom half of taxpayers was more than halved (findings dramatized in a National Taxpayers Union Foundation4 chart).

Did the wealthy pay their “fair share” of income taxes? The tax-share statistics surely leave more room for debate than Mr. Biden suggests.

Biden’s Income Definition

In the press for a wealth tax, Biden’s economic advisors5 have expanded substantially the definition of taxable income (but only for the extremely wealthy), arguing that

  • When an American earns a dollar of wages, that dollar is taxed immediately at ordinary income tax rates. But when they gain a dollar because their stocks increase in value, that dollar is taxed at a low preferred rate, or never at all. Investment gains are a primary source of income for the wealthy…

Because many non-wealthy Americans have little to no investments (so claimed), the President’s advisors have declared that the tax system favors the wealthy by lowering their tax payments (and undercutting funding for social programs). Because worker earnings and capital gains are measured in dollars, Biden’s advisors see them as conceptually equivalent, but are they? Not really—and treating them the same is a political sleight-of-hand.

See the rest here

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Why Do We Elect Politicians and Governments that Wage War on Sovereign States?

Posted by M. C. on June 8, 2023

This deprives the people of their elementary right to peace and freedom. Are governments a clique separate from the population?

Many adults react to these politicians like children in the form of a magical belief in authority, uncritical and clouded by moods, feelings and promises of happiness. And this has consequences: Belief in authority inevitably leads to allegiance to authority, which usually triggers the reflex of absolute spiritual obedience and paralysis of the mind.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/why-do-we-elect-politicians-governments-wage-war-sovereign-states/5821440

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*** 

Introduction

After reading two articles in “RTD”, I asked myself again why we citizens elect politicians and governments year after year that go to war against sovereign states – for example against the nuclear power Russia? The article by “RIA Novosti” is “NATO plans direct war against Russia” (1) and the second article is a documentary by Anna Chapman “Red Alert: Why is Germany so bent on war?” (2), which was probably first published on 24 January.

The people and their citizens are deprived of the management of their own affairs, the determination of their own actions and the care of their own welfare by such an election. Why should the people not be able to realise their own ideas and put their self-developed concepts of life into practice?

My demand therefore remains: “Hand over power to no one!” (3) and on the question of war and peace the people should have the last word. We humans are capable of living together without weapons and wars (4).

NATO’s secret plans for military action against Russia

According to Viktoriya Nikiforova, a columnist for “RIA Novosti”, the US magazine “Newsweek” reports on secret plans of the NATO alliance to go to war against Russia. These plans are to be adopted at the next NATO summit, which will take place in Vilnius on 11 and 12 July (5).

Literally, she writes:

“Officially, the summit programme lists only six tasks for the bloc in connection with the confrontation with Russia. These are the harmonisation and coordination of the Alliance’s forces in all theatres of war, long-term cooperation with private companies in the field of defence, increasing the production of weapons and ammunition, and building up reserves in the event of a long-term war. These are not tasks just for today – it is openly admitted that the realisation of these goals will take several years.” (6)

Why is the German mainstream so obsessed with war?

The opening credits of Anna Chapman’s documentary state:

“Ken Jebsen, Liane Kilinc, Dagmar Henn… The number of people persecuted for their opinions in Germany is growing inexorably: anyone who does not obediently follow the anti-Russian, pro-Ukrainian war course is in trouble. Why is the German mainstream so bent on war?” (7)

Towards the end she writes:

“Those who oppose the self-destructive course, advocate peace with Russia and call for an end to the European imperialist expansionist course in Ukraine are muzzled in various ways, up to and including prosecution.

What has become of Germany? Why and where are we heading? Why is Berlin so bent on imposing sanctions and supporting Kiev at the expense of its own economy and population? Who is really steering the country? And who is manipulating the German mainstream?” (8)

Surely the truth is that Germany has a great responsibility both to the previous generation and to its youth?

The post-war generation did a great deal to make Germany a respected and economically strong state again after the Hitler blow and the horrors of the Russian campaign. A war against Russia must not be repeated and should be taught to the partly history-less German youth both at the family table and in school.

In her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem. An Account of the Banality of Evil”, Hannah Arendt reproduces a quote by Bertolt Brecht from 1933 in the preface:

“O Germany, pale mother!

How besmirched thou sittest

Among the nations.

Among the stained

You stand out.

…

Hearing the speeches that come from your house, people laugh.

But he who sees you reaches for the knife.”  (9) 

Are governments a clique separate from the population?

Every four to five years in our Western democracies, corrupt politicians are elected to high government offices and are regarded as respectable authorities. Politicians immediately associate this attribution with claims to power, create a relationship of superiority and subordination and impose their will on the citizens; more precisely, the will or instructions of their clients, the global power elite.

In doing so, they pursue a policy at the expense of the working population that enables the billionaire elite in the background to steal so many billions of dollars that they can buy almost anything or anyone, from venal politicians to the corrupt World Health Organisation (WHO). These rulers cannot be trusted now or in the future.

The government or the state is the totality of all political, legislative, judicial and military institutions that deprive the people of the management of their own affairs, the determination of their own actions, the care of their own welfare.

Do government politicians then possess certain moral qualities such as wisdom, justice or impartiality? Are they so exceptionally gifted that they can put themselves in the place of the whole people and take better care of the interests of the people? Are they infallible and morally uncorruptible, so that the lot of anyone can reasonably be entrusted to their goodness?

In any case, the rulers are those who have the power to make laws to regulate the relations of men with each other and who have, among other things, the power to make war or peace with the governments of other countries.

Who puts them in their high places? Do they impose themselves by the right of war, conquest or revolution? Or are the governments “elected” by universal suffrage? But this in no way proves the justice, the wisdom, the abilities of those elected. Often those who can best lie (Tolstoy) and deceive the people are elected and the minority, which may be half of the electorate, is sacrificed.

As a rule, governments are made up of the haves and those who serve them; therefore, they are completely at the service of the haves. The very richest among them do not even have to bother to be part of the governments, MPs or ministers themselves. It is enough for them that the deputies and ministers are at their disposal.

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Doug Casey on How the War on Farmers Could Trigger a Famine

Posted by M. C. on June 8, 2023

As a class, farmers are natural enemies of socialist governments. It’s true that they can be corrupted, much as many farmers have been in the US with subsidies since the 1930s. But farmers tend to be independent freethinkers.

Governments, therefore, hold them in suspicion and are inclined to pay special attention to farmers.

Interestingly, the #1 mission of the USDA, stated on its website, is to combat climate change. Not to improve food production.

Doug Casey on How the War on Farmers Could Trigger a Famine

by Doug Casey

War on Farmers Could Trigger a Famine

 Subscribe to International Man

International Man: Recently, we have seen governments in the Netherlands, and Canada move to shut down farms under the pretext of climate change.

According to John Kerry, Biden’s “climate czar,” similar moves against US farms are in the works.

The US and the Netherlands are two of the largest agricultural producers in the world.

It seems certain Western countries are waging war against farmers in the name of climate change.

What is really going on here?

Doug Casey: I hate to say that things like COVID or a rabid belief in anthropogenic climate change are parts of a conspiracy—although it often seems that way. I tend to discount conspiracies for a number of reasons. It seems more likely they’re mass hysterias—the type of thing that happened in Salem at the end of the 17th century, except on a gigantic scale. Versions of the kind of “group think” that captured a number of countries in the 20th century, as well.

In any event, what appears to be a war against agriculture on the part of “the elite” is both real and serious. People in power are anxious to control every aspect of the plebs’ lives, usually either for the supposed good of humanity or the planet itself. They believe there should be rules governing where the plebs live, what they can say and think, and even what they eat. The “elite” like to say farm animals are partly responsible for global warming by emitting methane.

But maybe it’s more than that. Maybe it’s a general belief, even among the plebs themselves, that the world’s population, composed mostly of useless eaters, is too high. The powers that be have said on any number of occasions that eight billion people is “too many” and that an optimal level would be less than a billion.

Here’s an outlandish thought: They can’t put people in gas chambers anymore and hope to get away with it. But perhaps reducing the quantity and quality of their food consumption, among other measures, can have the same effect. A crazy thought? Don’t forget that governments have sponsored wars, famines, and persecutions that have killed hundreds of millions. There’s no reason to think that today’s “elite” are any less nefarious than their antecedents. Rather the contrary…

There’s plenty of evidence that the kind of people who control the world and run governments have evil intentions toward their fellow humans. Even while they masquerade as philanthropists and humanitarians, they typically treat them either as a means to their ends or a nuisance.

International Man: Government central planning of agriculture can be catastrophic.

For example, millions of people perished in famines in the Soviet Union due to disastrous policies forced upon farmers.

Do you see any parallels today?

Doug Casey: Government, as an institution, is congenitally incapable of creating anything.

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Authoritarians Don’t Get Discouraged By Constant Failure

Posted by M. C. on June 8, 2023

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Like, Totally Orwellian: Nearly A Third Of GenZ Favors ‘Government Surveillance Cameras In Every Household’

Posted by M. C. on June 8, 2023

From Ivy League campuses to the publishing industry and the digital domains of Facebook, there is an Orwellian sense of perpetual emergency, an irrational fear that misinformation and hate speech will overwhelm society unless every utterance is subject to a censor’s scrutiny.

What’s interesting about that is that 53% of Americans who support a CBDC also support in-home surveillance cameras.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/totally-orwellian-nearly-third-genz-favors-government-surveillance-cameras-every

Tyler Durden's Photo

BY TYLER DURDEN

Nearly one-third of Generation Z says they’d be just fine with government-installed surveillance cameras in every household under the guise of reducing domestic violence and other illegal activity.

“Would you favor or oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every household to reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity?” asks a new survey from the Cato Institute. Of the responses, 29% of those aged 18-29 said yes.

As the NY Post notes;

In 1791, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed building a “panopticon” in which people’s behavior could be monitored at all times.

But Bentham’s panopticon was meant to be a prison. A sizable segment of Generation Z would like to call it home.

When it comes to other age brackets, 20% of millennials (between the ages of 30 and 44) also want everyone watched.

Then, wisdom appears to kick in – as just 6% of Americans aged 45 and older were OK with government surveillance in every home.

Broken down by politics, 19% of liberals and 18% of centrists agreed that our daily lives should be monitored by the government for our own safety, while 9 – 11% of those who identify as conservative, very conservative, or very liberal agreed in what appears to be a “horseshoe” issue that unites both ends of the political spectrum.

It’s the middle that has the ethic of old East German secret police — or the KGB.

Maybe that’s not surprising considering the way respectable liberal institutions now run themselves.

From Ivy League campuses to the publishing industry and the digital domains of Facebook, there is an Orwellian sense of perpetual emergency, an irrational fear that misinformation and hate speech will overwhelm society unless every utterance is subject to a censor’s scrutiny.

Even Orwell didn’t imagine Newspeak would require new pronouns. -NY Post

Broken down by race, 33% of black Americans said they’re fine with government in-home surveillance, as did 25% of hispanics, 11% of whites, and 9% of asians respectively.

The question was asked as part of the Cato Institute’s survey on American attitudes on the prospect of a ‘central bank digital currency.’ What’s interesting about that is that 53% of Americans who support a CBDC also support in-home surveillance cameras.

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Environmentalism and the Immoral Low Ground | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on June 8, 2023

There’s a common misconception that the next great evil ideological mania to sweep our world will be easily identified as a sinister movement from the outset. But that’s not true. The next great evil will play out like all the past ones. It will sound good to many. It will be popular. And there will be social pressure to join in. But underneath the moving language will lie a rejection of humanity—be it a subset or the whole species. That rejection plants the seed for future atrocities.

Now every state would be telling US not to charge EVs because power plants can’t keep up.

https://mises.org/wire/environmentalism-and-immoral-low-ground

Last month, the Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency proposed new power plant regulations that would put harsh limits on the amount of carbon dioxide released while producing electricity. This comes from the same administration pushing to electrify all parts of daily life, from driving to cooking. As if slamming the power grid with artificial demand is not enough, now the federal government has also set its sights on electricity suppliers.

Policies as ludicrous as this are only possible because the ideology they rest on, environmentalism, has long enjoyed a perch on the moral high ground that has gone almost unchallenged. That needs to change. Environmentalism presents itself as a philosophy advocating benevolence toward nature and prudence with resources. But in reality, it is an antihuman ideology capable of justifying atrocities.

Environmentalism rests on the valuation of untouched, nonhuman nature as the highest good. There are, of course, radical and moderate environmentalists, but all adherents subscribe to this fundamental moral valuation. They only differ in their degree of consistency.

This moral view was perhaps best summarized by National Park Service biologist David Graber in his 1989 review of Bill McKibben’s book The End of Nature. Dr. Graber concludes his review with these three haunting paragraphs:

That makes what is happening no less tragic for those of us who value wildness for its own sake, not for what value it confers upon mankind. . . . McKibben is a biocentrist, and so am I. We are not interested in the utility of a particular species, or free-flowing river, or ecosystem, to mankind. They have intrinsic value, more value—to me—than another human body, or a billion of them.

Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line—at about a billion years ago, maybe half that—we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth.

It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil-energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.

That final line was unsurprisingly revisited during the last few years. In this view, if there was anything bad about covid-19 it’s that it was not deadly enough—especially for young people who have yet to have kids. That viewpoint is evil.

This idea that humanity is a cancer can be found in the writings and arguments of other environmentalists, though most are less explicit. 

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Not a Single American Deserved to Die in Korea

Posted by M. C. on June 7, 2023

We can never know what might have happened to South Korea had the United States not intervened in the Korean civil war. Regardless of whatever good things happened in South Korea after the war, however, it was not worth 36,000 dead Americans, or even one dead American. Ask the families of the U.S. soldiers who died in the Korean War if the loss of their loved ones is worth whatever became of South Korea.

No American soldier should ever have to die in defense of some other country.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/not-a-single-american-deserved-to-die-in-korea/

by Laurence Vance

The remains of an American soldier were laid to rest on Memorial Day at the Andersonville National Cemetery in Georgia after a police car with lights flashing escorted the casket to the cemetery. What made this funeral service so unique and so tragic is that Pfc. Luther Herschel Story was killed on September 1, 1950, during the Korean War. He was just eighteen years old.

Story left high school during his sophomore year and enlisted in the Army. In the summer of 1950, he deployed to Korea with Company A of the 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment. After he was wounded when his unit came under attack by three divisions of North Korean troops, Story seized a machine gun and killed or wounded about 100 men according to his Medal of Honor citation that his father received at a Pentagon ceremony in 1951. “Realizing that his wounds would hamper his comrades, he refused to retire to the next position but remained to cover the company’s withdrawal,” the award citation said. “When last seen, he was firing every weapon available and fighting off another hostile assault.” An unidentified body recovered from the area where Story was last seen fighting was buried in 1950 with other unknown service members at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii.

According to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, of the more than 36,000 American soldiers who died in the Korean War, more than 7,500 of them remain missing or unidentified.

Story’s remains were disinterred in 2021 as part of a broader military effort to determine the identities of unknown Korean War veterans. DNA from Story’s bones was matched with DNA samples submitted by his mother and his niece.

It is good that Story’s remains were identified and his surviving family members notified. But this doesn’t change the fact that Story’s death was senseless, in vain, pointless, unnecessary—and entirely preventable.

After World War II, the United States and its allies divided Korea at the 38th parallel, with the Soviets occupying the north and the Americans occupying the south. After three years and three million, mostly civilian, deaths, the Korean War ended in 1953 in a stalemate roughly along that same miliary demarcation line, which then became the border between North and South Korea..

There was no U.S. declaration of war against North Korea. There was no congressional authorization for the president to use military force in defense of South Korea. There was no cry from Americans for the government to take sides or intervene in a civil war halfway around the world. There was no duty for the United States to contain communism. There was no threat to the United States by North Korea. No American in Alaska, Hawaii, California, Topeka, or Peoria was in any danger from anyone in North Korea. There was absolutely no reason for 1,789,000 American soldiers or one American soldier to go to Korea. President Harry Truman simply ordered U.S. troops to go to Korea, and they obeyed—just like they obeyed orders and went to Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

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The Ukrainian Army Is Run Not by the Generals but by the PR Department

Posted by M. C. on June 7, 2023

Yesterday Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. who is campaigning against Joe Biden for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party in the 2024 U.S. elections publicly announced that approximately 350,000 Ukrainian combatants have died in the area of Russia’s Special Military Operation so far. Judging by yesterday’s massacre during the first big attack by the Ukrainians in the southern Donetsk oblast, the death toll will accelerate in the days ahead. Are any people of conscience listening in Europe or the USA?

antiwar.com

What can you expect from a government headed by a comic actor named Zelensky? We see the answer to that question day by day in the way the Ukrainian armed forces are carrying out their much-anticipated spring counteroffensive: it is being stage managed by the Public Relations team with scant regard for their cannon fodder army.

Why do I say this? Because each of the latest military setbacks if not outright fiascoes of military operations is being covered up by sensational sideshows intended to divert public attention at home and especially abroad from what is going on in the battlefield.

In the past couple of weeks, Zelensky was under enormous pressure from Washington to finally launch the much heralded counteroffensive. Notwithstanding his complaints that insufficient new military hardware had arrived to date and his demands on NATO countries to step up deliveries of tanks and F16 fighter jets, the Pentagon was insisting that the Ukrainians were now well equipped and should prove on the battlefield that this investment by the Americans and Europeans was justified, to prove that they can indeed push back the Russians and free all the occupied territory.

Yet, on the battlefield all that we saw was positional fighting and probing for weak spots in the Russian defense lines. There was no sign of a massive counter offensive until a day ago. What we saw instead were incursions of Ukrainian special forces, mostly said to be mercenaries from Poland and elsewhere, across the border from the Ukrainian held Kharkov oblast into the neighboring RF oblast of Belgorod. And then, about four days ago, we saw the start of a destructive artillery and rocket attack on the border town of Shebekino, where 400 or 600 strikes on residential neighborhoods have been recorded in 24 hour periods. As we now see daily on Russian television, the whole population on the Russian side of the border across from Kharkov city is being evacuated and media there are discussing why their government has not done more to protect the frontier and to hit back.

Of course, if the Kremlin were to do so it would fall into the trap of withdrawing forces from the front lines and weakening preparedness for whatever mass counter offensive may yet lie ahead. But it would be more appropriate to see in the border attacks on Belgorod not a military tactical purpose but a PR dimension, to capture the airwaves and divert attention from the still delayed massive offensive by providing some highly photogenic developments for the news crews.

Today’s number one item on Euronews is the destruction of part of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant in the southern region of Kherson to one side of the Dnepr river, with the consequence that water from the reservoir to feed the plant now is pouring out in uncontrolled fashion into the Dnepr. Let us remember that here the right (western) bank of the Dnepr, with the homonymous former capital town of the Kherson oblast, is held by the Ukrainians and the left (eastern) bank is held by the Russians.

Threats to the large Kakhovka reservoir were discussed widely in local and global media more than eight months ago when the Russians abandoned Kherson city and withdrew all forces to the left bank of the Dnepr. At that time already, the Russians anticipated a possible breach of the dam with the consequence of dangerous, life threatening flooding downstream. They pulled back the local population from areas deemed to be most at danger. Moreover, as CNN reminds us, the shutdown of the hydroelectric power plant which ran on water from the reservoir might put at risk the not too distant Zaporozhie nuclear power plant, where critical equipment for its operation run on electricity generated by the Kakhovka plant. So the nuclear danger once again raises its ugly head.

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‘Give War a Chance’ – A ‘War That Even Pacifists Can Get Behind’

Posted by M. C. on June 7, 2023

But the flip-side to this Atlanticist aspiration – as President Emmanuel Macron noted – is its inexorable logic that Europeans simply end by becoming American vassals. Macron was trying rather, to rally Europe towards the coming ‘age of empires’,hoping to position Europe as a ‘third pole’ in a concert of empires.

The Atlanticists were duly enraged by Macron’s remarks (which nonetheless drew support of other EU states). It could even seem (to furious Atlanticists) that Macron actually was channelling General de Gaulle who had called NATO a “false pretence” designed to “disguise America’s chokehold over Europe”.

https://strategic-culture.org/news/2023/06/05/give-war-a-chance-a-war-that-even-pacifists-can-get-behind/

Alastair Crooke

The West is now waking up to the reality of the emerging, polycentric and fluid global order, Alastair Crooke writes.

More than a year into Russia’s Special Operation, the initial burst of European excitement at western push-back on Russia has dissipated. The mood instead has turned to “existential dread, a nagging suspicion that [western] civilisation may destroy itself”, Professor Helen Thompson writes.

For an instant, a euphoria had coalesced around the putative projection of the EU as a world power; as a key actor, about to compete on a world scale. Initially, events seemed to play to Europe’s conviction of its market powers: Europe was going to bring down a major power – Russia – by financial coup d’état alone. The EU felt ‘six feet tall’.

It seemed at the time a galvanising moment: “The war re-forged a long-dormant Manichaean framing of existential conflict between Russia and the West, assuming ontological, apocalyptic dimensions. In the spiritual fires of the war, the myth of the ‘West’ was rebaptised”, Arta Moeini suggests.

After the initial disappointment at the lack of a ‘quick kill’, the hope persisted – that if only the sanctions were given more time, and made more all-embracing, then Russia surely would ultimately collapse. That hope has turned to dust. And the reality of what Europe has done to itself has begun to dawn – hence Professor Thomson’s dire warning:

“Those who assume that the political world can be reconstructed by the efforts of human Will, have never before had to bet so heavily on technology over [fossil] energy – as the driver of our material advancement”.

For the Euro-Atlanticists however, what Ukraine seemed to offer – finally – was validation for their yearning to centralise power in the EU, sufficiently, to merit a place at the ‘top table’ with the U.S., as partners in playing the Great Game.

Ukraine, for better or worse, underlined Europe’s profound military dependence on Washington – and on NATO.

More particularly, the Ukraine conflict seemed to open the prospect for consolidating the strange metamorphosis of NATO from military alliance to an enlightened, Progressive, peace alliance! As Timothy Garton Ash effused in the Guardian in 2002, “NATO has become a European peace movement” where one could watch “John Lennon meet George Bush”.

The Ukraine war is portrayed, in this vein, as the “war­ that even former pacifists can get behind. All its proponents seemed to be singing is “Give War a Chance””.

Lily Lynch, a Belgrade-based writer, argues that,

“…especially in the past 12 months, telegenic female leaders such as the Finnish Prime Minister, Sanna Marin, German Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, and Estonian Prime Minister, Kaja Kallas, have increasingly served as the spokespersons of enlightened militarism in Europe … ”

“No political party in Europe better exemplifies the shift from militant pacifism to ardent pro-war Atlanticism than the German Greens. Most of the original Greens had been radicals during the student protests of 1968 … But as the founding members entered middle age, fissures began to appear in the party – that would one day tear it apart”.

“Kosovo then changed everything: The 78-day NATO bombing of what remained of Yugoslavia in 1999, ostensibly to halt war crimes committed by Serbian security forces in Kosovo, would forever transform the German Greens. NATO for the Greens became an active military compact concerned with spreading and defending values such as human rights, democracy, peace, and freedom – well beyond the borders of its member states”.

A few years later, in 2002, an EU functionary (Robert Cooper) could envisage Europe as a new ‘liberal imperialism’. The ‘new’ was that Europe eschewed hard military power, in favour of weaponising both a controlled ‘narrative’ and controlled participation in its market. He advocated for ‘a new age of empire’, in which Western powers no longer would have to follow international law in their dealings with ‘old fashioned’ states; they could use military force independently of the United Nations; and could impose protectorates to replace regimes which ‘misgovern’.

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