by Denis A. Conroy for The Saker Blog
“Europe ‘coming apart before our eyes’, say 30 top intellectuals”. The Guardian, 26 Jan 2018. The group of 30 writers, historians and Nobel laureates state that “we must now will Europe or perish beneath the waves of populism”. Which immediately raises the question; who is the ‘we’ that must do the willing…the answer would appear to be the church of the neo-liberal Zionist order working from within the precincts of a covert calculus.
The 800-word paean was drafted by the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levi. Signatures included the novelist Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie, the historian Simon Schama and the Nobel prize laureates Svetlana Alexievitch, Herta Muller, Ophan Pamuck and Elerieve Jelinek and the whole exercise came across as a continuation of a sheeple-people paradigm that has its origins in Western ‘saviour’ mythology. Quick off the mark to capitalise on World War 2’s victor mentality, the latter-day exponents of ‘white-man’s-burden’ philosophy express their allegiance to the status quo per medium of a propaganda apparatus serving elite interests…a group indeed… focusing on adversarial groups contesting the idea that the EU (Europe) is a viable union.
Having spent the past 75 years exploiting the print media and the big silver screen, the simplistic adumbrations of virtue-speak have in no way lost their hold over the masses. The elites who have taken ownership of the good-verses-evil narrative are the same elites who have always believed it their right to own the moral high ground. The ‘we’, here to save you with a paean lamenting the supposed threats to an obviously internecine economic system committed to perpetrating an order that favours banking elites and other institutional heavyweights, is nothing more than a hoary piece of existential rhetoric crafted to present Europe as a jewel in the evolutionary crown. Have these ’30 top intellectuals’…top heavy public intellectuals maybe…succumbed to selective amnesia?
“Abandoned from across the channel and from across the Atlantic by the great allies who in the previous century saved it twice from suicide; vulnerable to the increasingly overt manipulations of the master of the Kremlin, Europe as an idea, as will and representation, is coming apart before our eyes,” the text read.
But Europe has been coming apart and regrouping (the Sphinx is aware that the group is wrong even when it is right). The “doge” was the title of the senior-most elected official of Venice and Genoa in 8th century Byzantine times. The billionaires and the Royals of the 21st century share synchronicity with the doges of the Byzantine Empire. A doge was referred to variously by the titles, “My Lord the Doge”, or, “Most Serene Prince”, or, “His Serenity”. They occupied a place in historic capitalism where the sanctity of private …institutional…power was maintained by monetising market share and investments made for corporate market gain. The line that extends from 8th.century Italian capitalism to contemporary times is marked by the practice of extracting profit for the few…the elite…and any thought that public utilities could do a less onerous job is apostasy de jure!
Ignoring the collateral damage that historians tend to omit from ledgers associated with solipsistic elitism is akin to drinking the elixir-of-life from a half-filled glass. Ignoring the fact that the wars of ‘the previous century’ were started by elites…as is still the case in this century…is akin to pulling the wool over our own eyes so as not to see the Anglo Zionist elephant in the room busily taking ownership of our lives per medium of propaganda and ‘the great allies who in the previous century saved it (Europe) twice from suicide’ were in fact responsible for numerous Herculean faux pas that ultimately define European history as class struggle. But don’t blame the perpetrators of these crimes…focus on populist unrest?
It appears that nations, like individuals, are composed of two basic dynamics… inductive and deductive reason being the staple elements…nurture versus reason…in a system made available to individuals and nations alike that enable actors to achieve resolutions that clarify reality in order to achieve unity of purpose. The mathematics of the situation clearly suggest that 1+1=3 in matters of human development vis a vis free will confirm that nature and nurture exist as a formidable duo engaged in the task of producing a progeny. The name of this offspring is Resolution and it is reason’s third leg. Trinitarian expropriation of this phenomena in the pursuit of elite religious interests, disregard the fact that enlightenment is not something that is gifted to an elite. The math suggests that reason is no longer reason when it is privatized. Nurturing Resolution may require the participation of the entire polity.
The ‘previous century’ saw the ‘doge class’ produce the highly contentious Treaty of Versailles whose ramifications continue to resound throughout the Western world to this very day.
Article 231 of that treaty later became known as the War Guilt Clause. The treaty required Germany to disarm, make ample territorial concessions, and pay reparations to certain countries that had formed the Entente powers. They were designated the guilty party in perpetuity…the victors had spoken!
In 1921 the total cost of these reparations was assessed at 132 billion marks—roughly equivalent to US $442 billion, or UK 284 billion pounds in 2019. At the time, economists, notably John Maynard Keyes (a British Delegate to the Paris Peace Conference), predicted that the treaty was too harsh and said that the reparation figure was excessive. It was this bellicose 1+1=3 resolution that laid the groundwork for the next episode of hostility where elites continued to stoke the embers of internecine gravitas.
From the early decades of the ‘previous century’, it became apparent that civilians had been moved into the crosshairs of warfare and that collateral damage had become a thing of little importance. The elites on both sides of the divide sought to inculcate, per means of persistent instruction, a phony gravitas suggesting that virtue is the father of patriotism. So therefore, participating in battle could mean achieving dignity and a place of importance in the community you belonged to. In time, German elites would be demonized in ways that suggested that they were more obnoxious than other elites. Eventually, on being occupied by zealots of a dystopian empire masquerading as savours, they would seek to retain their sovereignty per populist means.
The West in the ‘previous century’ ushered in Russophobia…indifferent to the fact that Russia had been an ally throughout World War 2…imagining that Russia’s experiment with Communism could threaten its private interests, it resorted to calumny on a grand scale. Together, the termites of Wall Street set out to prove that their termite colony was greater than the sum of its parts.
Europe soon found itself hosting NATO, a blustering military behemoth that was used to destroy Libya and other small countries that did not have the means to defend themselves. It is no secret that show-pony philosopher Bernard-Henri Levi and his ‘liberal’ cohorts were instrumental in inveigling Nicolas Sarkozy to wage a war of ‘humanitarian intervention’ against Muammar Gaddafi and the State of Libya. The outcome was the destruction of that country, and an ensuing tide of collateral humanity seeking refuge in Europe met with distain upon arrival… a class of inferior people whose nuisance value was merely an irritation to the comforts of the Cafe Latte set. An out of sight, out of mind attitude was the resolution to this problem. Understanding how their elites caused this to happen, was a bridge too far!
At which point we should pause a moment to ponder what is meant by the statement “the two great allies who in the previous century saved it twice from suicide” and what it might mean to the 30 venerable signatories who seem to believe that it was ok for European countries to connive with its allies… the USA and Israel… in destroying whole countries.
Had these spectral elites, our allies, generated a fear of criticism capable of short-circuiting the deductive-logic that might otherwise raise concerns about the insidious actions of our ‘democratic’ partners? Accepting the role of unconscionable vassals faithfully trotting behind the USA sheriff while somehow believing themselves less vile because they held a scholarly idea of what the idea of European ideas might mean was subpar, to put it mildly.
There can be no doubt about it, European and American squabbles are cut from the same cloth. If we look closer, we can see that the power elites within these various states on either continent provide the military boots and camouflage-cloth that conceal the feet of clay of the Anglo Yeomen Class shuffling from country to country in military-attire to inflict death upon unsuspecting little brown natives in exotic places. The ‘we’ are the we that trample Palestine underfoot, sanction Venezuela to death, threaten to bomb countries back into the stone age, surround Russia with nuclear warheads, lie their way into Iraq so that they can render that country and many others dysfunctional so that Israel can reign supreme.
Internecine warfare is as old as history, but internecine economics is only as old as capitalism. In the modern era we observe how capitalism invests its vast resources in destroying every vestige of social development that attempts to prove that there are better options for securing stability in our fractious world. That ‘socialism’ can achieve a better balance between the nurturing dynamic and the creative dynamic remains a tantalizing proposition. The truth cannot be avoided, private ownership has a bad habit of sequestering the resources of the commons, thereby providing the conditions for gross inequality.
European scholars may lament the fact that the legacies of Erasmus, Dante, Goethe and Comenius are under threat. But its not true; their spirits continue to occupy the hallowed halls of scholarship/academic space where their bright markings arouse passionate interest.
On the other-hand it disturbs one to acknowledge that there is a total absence of names in connection with the 3 million Koreans and the 3 million Vietnamese who died when ‘we’ the West enacted an earlier version of humanitarian-intervention warfare…aka seek-and-destroy-the-competition in the spirit of might-is-right. Of the millions of Africans brought into slavery in America, few have names. They were used as pawns in a turbo-charged- internecine (economic) war that had no ethical moorings. It was plunder as you go with a break on Sunday to read the Bible.
But all this is merely the tip of the iceberg. While dealing with the subject of the West’s selective memorializing, does anybody in Europe…that jewel in the crown of superlative edifices… identify in the loss of 28 million Russian casualties (populists) defending their country from yet another aggressor during World War 11? Perhaps not, as European elites had in that century…as they had in previous centuries…designated Russia as a threat because it refused to kowtow to European elites. It would appear that European elites had scant regard for Russian lives while holding Russian resources in high regard.
The conclusion drawn from said “paean” is that the 30 signatories are somewhat ‘high’ on performance-hype. It strikes one as something that might work if it were addressed inhouse to a gathering of the ‘learned’.
Europe lost its imaginative edge to America when it forfeited the ideation-baton to its progeny who overran the original people of the Americas, believing that they would continue to run the race its ancestors had long run; coveting other people’s resources. Along with the baton it passed to its youthful successors came the cultural baggage of its parents. The subtext of the transmission implied that the progeny receiving the keys of the kingdom would build a modern-day utopia that would stand tall, though bereft of moral foundations. As modernity was equated with growth and exploitation of resources…especially those that were there for the taking…the new world soon became a business opportunity par excellence…until…as the wheel turned and kept turning it became ever more apparent that Europe’s progeny was motoring…full throttle…toward full-spectrum global dominance. Greed had donned the mantle of Emperor and it was not a pretty sight.
Strangely, Salman Rushdie told the Guardian: “Europe is in greater danger now than at any time in the last 70 years, and if one believes in that idea it’s time to stand up and be counted.”
Maybe the danger is that Europe, while under the influence of Anglo-Zionist projections, will become what America became, a monochromatic hybrid devouring its own progeny.
No suggestion in any of this that it is time for European nations to stop licking American arse…the fact is, one has a name if one of the elite and a number if you’re not.
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of a Continent, a part of the main.”
John Dunne, 1624 prose work.
Denis A. Conroy
Freelance writer
Australia
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