[1]
The women wore veils.
The men donned green Hamas headbands with swirling Arabic script.
They gathered by the thousands in a sunny, working-class plaza in Istanbul,
bellowing: “Damn Israel!”
[2]
The Saturday demonstration seemed incongruous with
the image Turkey has long had in the West as
a secular friend of Israel and the United States.
[3]
But in recent days,
public anger has flared over
Israel’s bloody seizure of a Turkish-flagged aid ship headed to the Gaza Strip,
which is under an Israeli blockade.
The incident occurred
as Turkey has been strengthening ties with Muslim governments in the region --
becoming more vocally pro-Palestinian and
trying to head off new U.N. sanctions on Iran.
[4]
That has prompted worried speculation at home and abroad: Is Turkey turning away from the West?
[Nonsense.
Are the actions of the current Israeli government
synonymous with [those of] the West?
So it would appear to Mary Beth Sheridan.]
It couldn’t be more predictable.
Back when Israel and Turkey were strategic allies
with extensive military-to-military ties,
prominent neoconservatives were vocal defenders of the Turkish government
and groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and AIPAC
encouraged Congress not to pass resolutions
that would have labeled what happened to the Armenians at the hands of the Turks during World War I a “genocide.”
(The “Armenian lobby” is no slouch,
but it’s no match for AIPAC and its allies in the Israel lobby).
The fact that the ADL was in effect protecting another country against the charge of genocide
is more than a little ironic,
but who ever said that political organizations had to be ethically consistent?
Once relations between Israel and Turkey began to fray, however --
fueled primarily by Turkish anger over Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians --
the ADL and AIPAC withdrew their protection
and Congressional defenders of Israel began switching sides, too.
Last week Jim Lobe published a terrific piece at InterPress Service,
detailing how prominent neoconservatives have switched
from being strong supporters (and in some cases well-paid consultants)
of the Turkish government
to being vehement critics.
He lays out the story better than I could,
but I have a few comments to add.
First,
if this doesn’t convince you that
virtually all neoconservatives are deeply Israeli-centric,
then nothing will.
This affinity is hardly a secret;
indeed, neocon pundit Max Boot once declared that support for Israel
was a “key tenet” of neoconservatism.
But the extent of their attachment to Israel is sometimes disguised by
the claim that what they really care about is freedom and democracy,
and therefore they support Israel
simply because it is “the only democracy in the Middle East.”
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recently led a panel of experts
in coming up with a report, “NATO 2020,” [.pdf]
which will be used to draft a replacement for
NATO’s current strategic concept, adopted in 1999.
The report essentially advocates
a continuation and expansion of
NATO’s quest to be all things to all people.
Unfortunately, this effort resembles the “expand or die” mantra
that was applied to NATO
as its primary mission – countering the Soviet Union –
was tossed into the dustbin of history.
Instead of expanding in territory and mission after the Cold War ended,
NATO probably should have died back then
and may die – or be severely crippled – by its likely loss in Afghanistan.
[This is a good look at an important topic,
one highly relevant to the United States's economy as well as that of Europe,
so it is reprinted here in its entirety.]
LISBON —
[1]
Sara Vale Lima, sales manager at Eical, a Portuguese textile company,
feels suffocated by the euro.
The common currency once meant flush banks and easy credit,
but these days it has laid bare a cold reality:
Portugal shares
the high wages and prices of richer northern European neighbors,
but not their competitiveness.
[2]
The price of a Portuguese roll of cloth, in euros,
often exceeds that of a similar product made in competing countries
outside the euro zone, like Poland or Turkey, by 30 percent.
Britain, once a big importer of Portuguese textiles,
has effectively devalued the pound, and Eical now sells almost nothing there.
“Things are quite difficult,” Ms. Vale Lima said.
[3]
Devaluation is the time-tested prescription for such ailments.
But Portugal is shackled to a currency that seems better suited to
the relative strength of Germany or France
than to southern countries like Portugal, Spain and Greece,
with their inefficient labor markets and tax systems and heavy debt.
[4]
The European Union and the 16 nations that use the euro face two crises.
One is the immediate problem of too much debt and government spending.
Another is the more fundamental divide, roughly north and south, between the more competitive export countries like Germany and France and the uncompetitive, deficit countries that have adopted
the high wages and generous social protections of the north
without the same economic ethos of strict work habits, innovation,
more flexible labor markets and high productivity.
[5]
As Europe grapples with its financial crisis,
the more competitive, wealthier countries
are reluctantly rescuing more profligate economies,
including Greece and Ireland,
from fiscal and bank woes,
while imposing drastic cuts in spending there.
[6]
Yet, even the staunchest defenders of the euro now acknowledge that
the currency union cannot survive
if its weaker members are caught in a perpetual hell
of austerity budgets and declining incomes
while the stronger countries are forced to tap taxpayers for financial rescues.
[7]
As the Continent faces more competition
from emerging rivals, including Brazil, Russia, India and China —
and low-wage Eastern European nations outside the euro —
the problems of the euro’s southern tier threaten to become
a vicious circle that could increase tensions
and make the common currency untenable, some economists say.
[8]
Business people in the southern countries call it the euro bind.
Oscar Turner, who runs a film company in Portugal, explained,
“The euro’s great if you’re traveling around,
but it’s an absurd idea to have the same currency
in a country like Greece or Portugal
as in Germany, which has totally different habits and culture.”
[9]
The highly indebted countries of the euro zone
“can’t grow their way out of debt,”
Mr. Turner said,
nor can they devalue to make their exports more competitive.
“No one in these countries can make the same product
for a price that competes” with Hungary, let alone Turkey or China.
[10]
Francisco Gaya runs a family ceramics company in eastern Spain
that is trying to survive by making niche products and shedding workers.
But manufacturing is too expensive in southern Europe,
Mr. Gaya said, in part because of
stiff state requirements for benefits, taxes and labor protections.
[11]
“Unions, difficulties created by layoffs, social and financial charges
have been exceedingly heavy,” Mr. Gaya said.
Spain, he said, needs to allow companies
to hire and dismiss workers much more easily.
But
“whoever does it will lose elections and not govern again for many years,”
he said.
[12]
These southern countries, some of them relatively new democracies,
took advantage of the euro to borrow money cheaply.
They lived on a bubble of credit and real estate development
that sent wages and debt soaring.
But they did little to improve their productivity, labor markets or tax systems
and are now paying a steep price in low growth or an actual decline,
with no easy fix.
[13]
Governments have cut spending.
But except for Greece, under the global gun,
significant legal and economic change is still lacking.
The imbalances plaguing the euro zone will not go away
unless the south can cut costs, including wages,
so its companies can compete.
But that process, referred to by economists as internal deflation,
is political poison.
[My opinion: that same problem, and medicine, is relevant to America.]
[14]
Nouriel Roubini, an economist at New York University
and the Cassandra of the economic crisis,
is not optimistic about the euro zone.
The problems of the periphery are essentially two, he said:
“High deficit and debt,
but also low growth driven in part by this competitiveness problem.”
Currency depreciation is impossible and deflation is painful.
[15]
“If you have to reduce prices and wages by 30 percent over the next five years,
deflation is associated with recession,
and no country can accept it,”
he said.
“Doing the German solution of structural reform is going to take a decade,
not fast enough to restore competitiveness.
The only other option is for the euro to weaken sharply.”
But with the German economy so strong and the American deficit so high,
he added, that is also unlikely.
[16]
Economists agree that the biggest test for the euro is Spain,
a country with an economy twice the size of
those of Greece, Portugal and Ireland combined.
“Spain isn’t off the cliff; it’s still a few miles away,
but moving pretty fast,” Mr. Roubini said.
“Can they do enough fiscal adjustments, structural reform,
restoring growth, reducing the unemployment rate, restoring competitiveness
in time to stop falling off the cliff?
I’m not sure.”
[17]
Stéphane Garelli of the IMD business school in Switzerland
studies competitiveness.
He says the main difference
is between countries with trade surpluses or deficits —
between those that export more than they import and those that do the reverse.
[18]
Germany, like the United States, may have high debt,
but no one doubts its ability to pay.
That is not true of southern economies, Mr. Garelli said.
“There was the illusion of economic growth, but it’s built on sand.
You can’t build an economy on real estate, finance and tourism.”
[19]
The World Economic Forum has issued competitiveness ratings for 20 years
based on increasingly sophisticated measures,
including government, law, ethics, infrastructure, technology, debt
and education,
said its lead economist, Jennifer Blanke.
Germany ranks fifth in the world of 139 countries, just after the United States.
The Netherlands is 8th, France 15th, Austria 18th, Belgium 19th.
But the southern economies of the euro zone are a different story.
Ireland comes in at 29, Spain at 42, Portugal at 46, Italy at 48
and Greece at 83.
[20]
One can see the problem clearly in Badalona, an industrial suburb of Barcelona.
Plásticos Juárez S.A. is a family business making decent profits
through sophisticated compression plastics, often lacquered or metal-plated,
for expensive cosmetics and perfume bottles.
The company has three small plants in Badalona.
[21]
Europe’s economic crisis hit the company hard:
sales to its mostly Spanish and French clients fell 30 percent,
said its current director, Javier Juárez Bernal.
Sales have largely recovered this year, but the company had to shrink.
It reduced its permanent staff and now relies on workers with three-month contracts that can be renewed only once.
[22]
Mr. Juárez would like to hire more contract workers for longer terms,
but says that government labor regulations make that impossible.
Adding to the permanent work force, with strict restrictions on layoffs,
is too risky.
[23]
On the factory floor, Dolores Fortunato Díaz, 24, is glad just to have a job.
“I feel lucky to be working,” she said. “Most of my friends are not.”
Spain has the highest unemployment rate in Europe, nearly 20 percent.
[24]
Another problem for the south is that
big European companies are migrating to
the most competitive parts of the euro zone.
Continental, the German maker of electronic braking systems and tires,
is no longer investing much in the south because wages have risen too high.
It is now building in lower-cost countries like Hungary and Slovakia,
where productivity is higher compared with wages and taxes.
[25]
Ralf Cramer, a member of the company’s executive board, said
Portugal once had production costs about one-quarter to one-fifth
the cost of German production.
“But they caught up more to our level,” Mr. Cramer said.
“So we’re not seeing Spain and Portugal as lower-cost labor.”
[26] Changing the structure of an economy to make it more competitive
is a far more difficult problem than
establishing a permanent bailout fund,
or even forcing austerity on countries with large deficits.
The south needs a thorough economic transformation,
and at the moment it does not have the growth —
or the support from the north —
to help it achieve that.
[27]
“Europe is divided,” said Mr. Roubini, the economist.
In essence, he said, “a good fraction of the euro zone
is still effectively in recession,
and it’s not even a double dip; they never got out of the first one.”
Maïa de la Baume and Scott Sayare contributed reporting from Paris.
Some two decades ago, when Europe’s leaders worked out the details of their grand vision to connect the European Union with a single currency, virtually every economist on this side of the Atlantic — and most of those on the other — figured out that the euro would be fatally flawed.
What took economists some time to understand was that Europe’s leaders didn’t much care what they thought.
“The European Commission did invite economists to present their views. It was a Darwinian process,” said Paul De Grauwe, professor of European political economy at the London School of Economics. “I was invited, but when I expressed my doubts I wasn’t invited anymore. In the end only the enthusiasts were left.”
The single currency served an overriding political objective.
Like the single market before, it was conceived primarily as glue to bind Europe more closely together, tie Germany’s prosperity to that of its neighbors and prevent a third world war from the Continent, which had brought us two. A few engineering flaws wouldn’t be allowed to get in the way of such an important project.
A little over a decade since the first euro bills hit the shops in Madrid and Berlin,
the euro’s design flaws have pushed much of the European Union
into a deep economic pit.
And political imperative is again being deployed
as a major reason to stick to the common currency.
“This enormously important motivation is often underestimated by outsiders,”
argued the Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf,
the most sober analyst of Europe’s economic maelstrom.
Yet for a project intended to draw Europe together, the euro did surprisingly little to build solidarity. German voters endured a recession two decades ago after bringing in their brethren from the Soviet bloc. They now appear unwilling to spend a pfennig to help the Greeks, Spaniards, Portuguese, Irish or Italians.
Conceived as a tool for integration, the euro could, instead, tear Europe apart.
...
Europe would be in much better shape if the euro didn’t exist and each member country had its own currency. Monetary union has shackled together nations with vastly different economies, depriving them of an independent monetary policy that can help them through rough times. The interest rate and exchange rate that serve Germany also have to serve Spain, though that country has more than four times Germany’s joblessness.
The main problem is that while leaders eagerly embraced the monetary bond, they rejected its necessary complement: a central budget that would transfer money from successful regions to underperforming ones, as the United States government sends tax dollars collected in Massachusetts to pay for unemployment benefits in Nevada.
The euro fed the illusion that Greece, Spain and Italy were as creditworthy as Germany or the Netherlands, propelling a decade-long credit boom in Europe’s less-developed periphery. And it was spectacularly ill-designed to deal with the shock when capital flows to those nations suddenly stopped. Weak countries not only had to rely on their own devices; they had to do so without a currency or a monetary policy of their own to absorb the blow.
There was no European budget to help Madrid out when its housing market and economy imploded and its unemployment rolls surged. Spain had no central bank to flood the economy with pesetas — to backstop its banks and to stimulate lending and investing.
The European Central Bank helped some by letting Spanish banks post government bonds as collateral for cheap three-year loans, providing some relief to the banks and leading to lower interest rates. But the central bank and its German paymasters have so far been unwilling to countenance a credit boom and higher inflation in Germany to juice economic growth in its neighbors.
Devaluation to strengthen Spain’s exports was, of course, out of the question. The only thing Spain could do was borrow to pay for unemployment insurance and other safety net programs that have exploded even as tax revenue shrank. When investors would lend it no more at bearable rates, it had to slash public spending, digging itself a bigger economic hole.
Germany’s leaders insist the solution for Spain and other sickly countries is to devalue “internally” to regain competitiveness, essentially, slashing wages to reduce labor costs. Yet it is unlikely that a democracy could sustain such an adjustment for long. Labor costs in Spain are still rising though almost one in four workers does not have a job. How deep would unemployment have to be for wages to start to fall?
Against the punishing austerity demanded by Germany, an exit from the euro — followed by a sharp devaluation — might not seem too bad a proposition.
For the nearly three years
that the euro-zone crisis has been underway,
a startlingly reliable pattern has set in.
Whenever the European Central Bank steps up
and deploys its bottomless ability to print euros
to ease the panic on financial markets,
everyone else steps down.
The political leaders in financially troubled southern European nations
see less urgency to the budget-cutting demanded of them
by the ECB, the International Monetary Fund
and other international creditors.
Germany, Finland and other strong Northern European countries
dig in their heels
on what concessions they demand for aid.
Then the ECB steps back,
lets market forces threaten to get out of control again
(specifically, by letting bond yields rise)
and forces the politicians to act in their common interest.
Rinse and repeat.
When she arrived in Britain a decade ago from Poland,
Justyna Mikler worked hard to find cleaning jobs, studied English
and, she says, never even thought of applying for welfare.
Now the director of a cleaning firm,
Ms. Mikler estimates that
about a third of the more than 50 Poles she employs
claim some form of benefits from the British state.
“The system allows them to do it so easily — it’s a nonsense,” she said,
speaking over a late lunch of soup in a cafe at a Polish center in West London.
As part of the 28-nation European Union,
Polish citizens have most of the same welfare rights here as Britons,
under a European Union policy designed to foster European integration
and create a vibrant economic market with mobile workers.
Instead, it seems to be driving Europeans apart.
...
The hottest welfare issue is payments to parents, which can be claimed even if children are living in another European nation. In Britain, Child Benefit, as it is known, is worth 20.30 pounds, or about $33.40, per week for a first child and 13.40 pounds for subsequent ones. According to British figures, in December 2012 there were Child Benefit awards to 24,082 parents for 40,171 children living elsewhere in Europe, including 25,659 children in Poland.
Mr. Cameron wants to reduce or end such benefits for children living abroad, and has suggested limiting the right of migrants to come to Britain if the average income of their home country is far below the European average.
Several other European Union countries have similar benefits for children and therefore share Britain’s worries, or have broader concerns about “welfare tourism,” in which people move abroad to secure payments. Britain says it is working with Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and others on possible changes.
But the British have special reasons to worry because of the design of the rest of their benefits system. Forged after World War II, the British welfare state is financed mainly from general taxation and is built on the idea that those in need should receive similar amounts, regardless of what they have paid in social security contributions.
Its architect, William Beveridge, sought to eliminate poverty, protecting Britons from the “cradle to the grave,” but he could not have foreseen a Europe with a shifting population of mobile workers.
Benefits available to European immigrants in Britain include tax credits for low-paid workers and housing subsidies. But other European countries base payments on contributions of employees or employers, making them less generous to newly arrived workers. In these “Bismarckian” systems — after the 19th century German chancellor Otto Von Bismarck — benefits are linked to previous earnings, according to a report by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for European Reform.
The report says those who lose jobs in France, Denmark or Germany can expect to receive 40 percent to 90 percent of their net salary for a specified period, much of it financed by compulsory social insurance or employer contributions. In Britain, the jobless receive a maximum 71.70 pounds per week for six months, however much they have paid in contributions.
“By Western European standards the British system is not very generous in terms of the amount you can claim, though of course this is more than in Eastern Europe,” said Stephen Booth, the research director of Open Europe, who helped draft the report, “but it’s very generous in terms of giving access to the benefits.”
[I]t is astounding how much the continent’s elites are dedicating their political and cultural energies to
“free trade,” climate change or empowering EU institutions —
these goals being pursued with the fervor of a moral panic,
as though they were panaceas to what ails us.
In contrast, there is little effort to mobilize society to fight against low fertility
so as to avoid
the fundamental, intractable problems associated with it.
All the economic and political fiddling in the world is pointless
if the biological basis of society is collapsing.
[Oh, but many of those problems
will only appear in the future.
For the present,
why not worry about, say, equal pay for women,
which will benefit those alive today.
Who cares about the world their children (if they had any!)
will inherit?]
...
But if [some people's ideals] were to entail
welcoming hundreds or thousands of immigrants from Africa and the Middle East every day, this is simply not compatible with the continued existence of European nations.
Let me start with a some basic observations. There has been a growing disillusionment with the European Union all over the member countries, due to the current state of affairs. This is especially true in the case of the so called newly joined countries, even though some (like Hungary) joined more than 10 years ago in 2004. Without going into details suffice to say that in a number of occasions it was proven that the ex-communist countries are treated as colony lights. Lower quailty products of the same brand sold in eastern EU countries, complete disrespect of local laws etc. There is and there has ever been an agreement that we don’t want wars, and poverty, so we need a Union. But the distance between deeds and promises has become too great to be covered by any kind of verbal magic. The veil of poliitical correctness has been finally lifted and instead of noble ideas pure and cruel interest advancement was found beneath.
Double standards (the favourite tool of the liberals) have become obvious. Collective punishment is forbidden yet the Benes decrees collectively condemning the germans and hungarians were not revoked as of today, minority rights are widely supported with the notable exception of some. Like the more than 3 million hungarians living in Romania, Slovakia and Serbia. And hungarian liberal turned communists have done completely nothing against it apart from almost bankrupting the country way ahead of the crisis in 2006.
RIGA, Latvia — In a significant move to deter possible Russian aggression in Europe, the Pentagon is poised to store battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and other heavy weapons for as many as 5,000 American troops in several Baltic and Eastern European countries, American and allied officials say.
The proposal, if approved, would represent the first time since the end of the Cold War that the United States has stationed heavy military equipment in the newer NATO member nations in Eastern Europe that had once been part of the Soviet sphere of influence.
[I think that statement is misleading.
During the Cold War (1945-1991) Eastern Europe was behind the Iron Curtain,
as the border between Soviet-controlled nations and "the Free World" was known.
During that period there was certainly no United States heavy military equipment in Eastern Europe.
So a more accurate statement would seem to be that
this is the first time ever
the U.S. has placed heavy military equipment so close to Russia.]
Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine have caused alarm and prompted new military planning in NATO capitals.
It would be the most prominent of a series of moves the United States and NATO have taken to bolster forces in the region and send a clear message of resolve to allies and to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, that the United States would defend the alliance’s members closest to the Russian frontier.
After the expansion of NATO to include the Baltic nations in 2004, the United States and its allies avoided the permanent stationing of equipment or troops in the east as they sought varying forms of partnership with Russia.
...
(Back to comments by KHarbaugh:)
It is interesting that we have just been commemorating the centennial of the beginning of The Great War, as the 1914-1918 war in Europe was once known.
A number of fine, lengthy books describe the run-up to that war (see, e.g.,
Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 and
Christoper Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914).
They discuss in detail how that great war was started by a relatively minor incident, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo.
Prepositioning U.S. military equipment so close to Russia
seems to me to make all-too-feasible
a similar escalation from minor issues to a really large conflict,
with no convenient off-ramp from the escalation.
Further,
positioning U.S. heavy military equipment so close to the border of Russia
seems militarily absurd to me.
Could the U.S. military really defend Eastern European nations from a determined push by Russia?
I think not.
That would require a buildup by the U.S. Army to a level approximating what it had during the Cold War.
Much of that combat power was shed as part of the "peace dividend"
which President Bill Clinton cashed in to pay for his "golden economy".
The U.S. national interest is just not there
in protecting the Baltic states and the Ukraine from Russian domination.
If Russia dominates, economically, politically, and culturally,
the Baltics and the Ukraine,
what difference does that make to America?
So far as I am concerned, not much.
Positioning that equipment over there is risks a major disaster for a not that large reward.
My opinion, for whatever it's worth (which to those "elites" doesn't seem much)
is that whether the Crimea is part of the Ukraine or of Russia
is really none of America's business.
That's an internal boundary dispute in Eastern Europe,
which has no evident effect on any reasonable American national interest.
Geographically, it certainly is critical to
Russia's access to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.
I can see why keeping such access under Russian control
is of great strategic importance to the Russian nation.
I don't see what is wrong with allowing them to maintain that control.
I just hope those in the "elites"
who always seem to be spoiling to have American get involved in conflicts
which are not really relevant to America
can restrain themselves from getting involved in this dispute.
At the practical level, those same "elites" always seem to want Russia's help
in restraining the Iranian nuclear program.
If those "elites" start sanctioning Russia,
how much help do you think the Russians are likely to continue giving
to sanctions against Iran?
Further, there are any number of ways Russia can push back against those who threaten it.
Is it really worth putting America's relations with Russia under further duress
over this issue?
I very strongly think not.
Would You Die for That Country? Why the United States needs to think twice before calling Ukraine an ally.
by Stephen M. Walt
foreignpolicy.com, 2014-03-14
No Hawks Here When it comes to conflict in world politics, realists are the peaceniks of post-Cold War America.
by Stephen M. Walt
foreignpolicy.com, 2014-04-17
Once again, trouble is brewing in some corner of the world --
this time it's Ukraine --
and neoconservatives and liberals are calling upon the United States
to "do something"
to stop the irrational predations of Russian President Vladimir Putin,
the latest villain du jour.
And once again, foreign policy realists are pointing out that
1) the United States has no treaty obligations to Ukraine,
2) U.S. vital interests are not at stake,
3) Russia's behavior is not surprising
given its history, its geographic location, and the past 20 years of NATO expansion, and
4) pursuing a confrontational policy with Moscow
will undermine more important objectives.
In other words, realists are telling Americans
to keep their rhetoric under control and their powder dry.
[Sounds pretty much exactly like what I said back on March 16.]
Once again Americans are watching their government involve itself
in an issue in which the United States has nothing at stake economically
and no genuine national security interest at risk.
Ukraine is a place that is worth neither a single American dollar
nor more than a brief scan of the headlines by U.S. citizens.
And yet Obama and his fellow European interveners and democracy mongers
are conducting themselves in a bellicose manner
that could lead to some kind of military conflict in Eastern Europe.
Indeed, they already are conducting warfare against Russia via economic sanctions,
a punitive exercise they promise to make more severe in the next few weeks.
And for what?
When all is said and done Obama and Team Democracy appear to prefer a war
to publicly admitting that it was their democracy crusading last winter in Kiev
that brought on this worrying and sharpening confrontation.
Into a increasingly bitter political battle between the Kiev regime and its domestic opponents,
the EU as an organization and individual European governments
sent a steady flow of diplomats, officials, and money
to help the Ukrainian opposition prevail over the Kiev regime.
This foreign intervention in a purely internal domestic dispute
was clearly designed to overthrow the legitimate Ukrainian government.
It is the kind of imperialist exercise that the UN was created to condemn and stop,
but that organization’s recent history shows that
it now exists solely to support unjustified — and usually unjustifiable —
U.S. and Western political and military interventions.
We will never know how the internal Ukrainian dispute would have worked itself out
if the Ukrainians had been allowed an exercise in self-determination,
but what we do we do know is that
the EU’s arrogant intervention in the country’s internal affairs
tipped the scales in the opposition’s favor and led to the Kiev regime’s collapse.
And we know that Obama, Kerry, and Biden steered clear of the problem
until they saw that the EU’s intervention might succeed.
Faced with that reality, these U.S. leaders put their best interventionist foot forward
and joined the Europeans to wreck both Ukraine and European stability
in the name of a democracy that will never see the light of day in Kiev.
Washington, NATO, and Brussels are now well on their way to creating in Ukraine
the same kind of democratic paradise they previously delivered in Egypt, Libya, and South Sudan.
They are also striding cluelessly along a road
that could lead to a war in Eastern Europe.
Why? Simple.
The democracy mongers operate on the assumption that
only the United States and Europe have legitimate national interests. [This is strikingly like the view that led to World War I.
When Serbian terrorists assassinated Archduke Ferdinand,
the Entente powers, Russia, France and Great Britain,
refused to recognize that Austria-Hungary had a legitimate grievance against Serbia.
Their failure to recognize the legitimacy of that grievance led them
to go to war with Austria-Hungary and Germany.
(That interpretation of events is well-documented in Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers).
Now we have much the same combination of forces,
with
Austria-Hungary versus Serbia
being replaced by
Russia versus Ukraine.]
Actions taken by non-Western states
to defend what they perceive to be life-and-death national interests
are labeled by Washington and NATO
as illegitimate, aggressive, war-causing operations.
But hold on for a moment.
Was it Russia that intentionally fomented revolution in Ukraine?
No, there is no evidence of that.
Was it Moscow that publicly threatened the Ukrainian opposition
with force and trials for war crimes?
No, it was the West and the UN
who treated the legitimate Ukrainian regime in that manner.
So it was, in fact, Washington, NATO, and the EU
who took a solely internal Ukrainian conflict
and, by intervening in favor of anti-Russian Ukrainians,
made it into a showdown between the West and Russia.
About Mr. Putin.
One must say that he is not a particularly likeable man,
and he is, after all, the legatee of
a political system that killed and starved-to-death 60-plus million people.
(NB: Odd, is it not, that the West spends years and billions of dollars
tracking down a handful of two-bit Serbian and African murderers,
but never utters a word about Russian and Chinese genocide-merchants
who have killed far more than 100 million people?)
Anyway, what has Putin done that makes him and Russia
the sole bad guys in this sorry Ukrainian drama?
Well, Mr. Putin had the gall to see that
the aggressive but always effete democracy mongers
were mindlessly intent on a regime-change operation in Kiev
that would put an anti-Russian regime in power,
increase animosities between the country’s ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Russians,
and destabilize Ukraine and perhaps have a knock-on destabilizing impact
along much of Russia’s western border.
Faced with this prospect,
Putin unleashed his armored columns and took Kiev and all Ukraine, right?
No.
Faced with what the West was doing to make Ukraine an anti-Russian bastion
and promote civil war in the country,
Putin simply did what genuine Russian national interests required,
he took what always has been and always must be Russia’s,
the Crimea and its naval bases.
Any Westerner who claims he was surprised by this action —
or the cause of it —
is either a liar or ignorant of Russian history.
Given the state of Western education,
the latter is at least as likely as the former.
So Putin takes Crimea and it votes to join Russia. End of crisis?
No.
Even though it is obvious that
U.S.-NATO-EU intervention caused the crisis in the first place,
the democracy mongers sanction Russia for protecting its national interests
and then pick-up the pace of intervention
by pumping funds into the anti-Russian regime in Kiev,
deploying U.S. military forces in NATO’s Eastern European members,
and Obama trying to prove he is not the terminal adolescent that Putin knows he is
by waging war against Russia via sanctions.
And, of course, there on the sidelines,
are America’s Neoconservatives urging the West
to threaten the use military force against Russia
and at least heavily arm the illegitimate government now operating in Kiev.
Like the terminal adolescents they are,
the leaders of both parties in the United States
and their counterparts in NATO and the EU
cannot bring themselves to admit the clear and simple fact that
they are responsible for the festering problem in Ukraine.
They have encountered in Putin a man who is unsavory and no hero
but one who is a thorough-going nationalist who will not roll over and play dead
and abandon his country’s security interests
because the intervention-addicted Western democracy mongers demand he do so.
Western pride, historical ignorance, and hubris makes admitting a mistake impossible,
so we continue meandering toward war.
A final word on sanctions.
Western interventionists ought to recall that
(a) economic sanctions are attacks on the targeted nation that amount to acts of war, and
(b) economic sanctions that savage an already fragile economy — like Russia’s —
can make the attacked state opt for war as a last resort.
Americans still debate whether FDR’s sanctions against Japan were an attempt to change Tokyo’s foreign policy or to force Japan to start a Pacific war FDR wanted to fight but the American people overwhelmingly opposed.
Which side of that debate is accurate is irrelevant here, and perhaps it is unknowable.
What is irrefutable fact, however, is that
FDR’s sanctions forced Imperial Japan to decide between war
and the withering away of its economic and military power
and the eventual termination of its status as a Great Power.
Even the West’s ill-educated leaders must know
the decision Imperial Japan took as the result of FDR’s sanctions.
Two comments:
First, a comparison with the causes of World War I.
The immediate causes of that war were
the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajavo
and the failure of Serbia to make an appropriate response to Austria-Hungary.
(See Margaret MacMillan and Christopher Clark’s (The Sleepwalkers) recent books for some good analysis.)
16 million deaths and 20 million wounded over that?
Obviously, to me at least, the major powers got too tied into their alliances.
The powers then got overly involved with Balkan politics;
now the West is making the same mistake with respect to Eastern Europe.
Compare Austria-Hungary/Serbia then to Russia/Ukraine today.
Second, why is Putin always painted so negatively?
Could it be because of the problems he has made for Jewish oligarchs?
President Trump’s personal lawyer has been in Budapest and Kyiv this week
to talk with former Ukrainian prosecutors
for a documentary series intended to debunk the impeachment case.
...
[2] Mr. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, met in Budapest on Tuesday with a former Ukrainian prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, who has become a key figure in the impeachment inquiry. He then traveled to Kyiv on Wednesday seeking to meet with other former Ukrainian prosecutors whose claims have been embraced by Republicans, including Viktor Shokin and Kostiantyn H. Kulyk, according to people familiar with the effort.
[3] The former prosecutors, who have faced allegations of corruption, all played some role in promoting claims about former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a former United States ambassador to Ukraine and Ukrainians who disseminated damaging information about Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, in 2016.
[4] Those claims — some baseless and others with key disputed elements — have been the foundations of the effort by Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani to pressure the Ukrainian government to commit itself to investigations that would benefit Mr. Trump heading into his re-election campaign. That effort in turn has led to the impeachment proceedings in the House against the president.
...
The European trip was organized around the filming of a multipart television series featuring Mr. Giuliani that is being produced and aired by a conservative cable channel, One America News, or OAN.
The series, the first two installments of which have already aired, is being promoted as a Republican alternative to the impeachment hearings, including Ukrainian “witnesses” whom House Democrats running the inquiry declined to call. Some of the Ukrainians interviewed by Mr. Giuliani were sworn in on camera to “testify under oath” in a manner that the network claims “debunks the impeachment hoax.”
Mr. Giuliani was joined in Budapest by an OAN crew, including the reporter hosting the series, Chanel Rion, who conducted an interview in the Hungarian capital with Mr. Lutsenko, according to someone familiar with the interview.
...
Also joining Mr. Giuliani and the OAN crew in Budapest were two former Ukrainian officials who have been supportive of Mr. Trump, Andrii Telizhenko and Andrii V. Artemenko.
The pair, along with a third former Ukrainian official, Mykhaylo Okhendovsky, recorded interviews at OAN’s studios in Washington late last month with Ms. Rion and Mr. Giuliani for an episode of the series that aired on Tuesday night.
The three Ukrainians questioned the Democrats’ case for impeachment during the episode. And they asserted that Mr. Trump had ample reason to ask Mr. Zelensky during their July 25 phone call to investigate the Bidens and whether Ukrainians acted improperly to damage Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign.
...
Ms. Rion falsely claimed on air that
the Democratic operative connected to the Ukrainian Embassy,
who has become a frequent target of House Republicans,
provided the ledger to The Times.
...
In Budapest, Mr. Giuliani had dinner on Tuesday night at the residence of the United States ambassador to Hungary, David B. Cornstein, a longtime friend and associate of both Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani.
...
One of the former prosecutors with whom Mr. Giuliani is seeking to meet in Kyiv is Mr. Shokin,
who claims his ouster was forced by Mr. Biden to prevent investigations into the gas company paying Mr. Biden’s son Hunter Biden.
Allies of the oligarch who owns the gas company say they welcomed Mr. Shokin’s firing,
but not because he was actively investigating the company or the oligarch. Rather, they say, he was using the threat of prosecution to try to solicit bribes.
Another prosecutor with whom Mr. Giuliani was seeking to meet, Mr. Kulyk,
had compiled a seven-page dossier in English accusing Hunter Biden of corruption,
and had taken steps to pursue an investigation into Burisma Holdings,
the gas company on whose board Hunter Biden served. Mr. Kulyk was fired recently by Mr. Zelensky’s new top prosecutor as part of an anti-corruption initiative.[??????????]
[The summary from the NYT web page on Thursday, 2015-09-16 1700 EDT:]
Officers fired water cannons and tear gas
after hundreds of migrants tried to break through a gate
at the newly reinforced border between Serbia and Hungary.
Thousands of migrants sought alternate routes west.
BRENNERO, Italy — Since the days of ancient Rome, conquering armies have traversed the Brenner Pass, a scenic gorge in the Alps connecting the boot of Italy to the heart of Europe. Now, nations to the north fear that this vital passage will become the funnel for a new “invasion” of migrants.
A thousand miles away in Greece, the main migrant route into Europe is shutting down amid stricter border controls in the Balkans and a deal with Turkey to stop new arrivals from the Middle East, Africa and beyond. Yet as one door closes, concern is mounting in a host of countries that the poor and desperate may find another way in.
Claiming that as many as 1 million more migrants are massing in Libya with the aim of crossing into Europe through Italy, the Austrians, for instance, are laying the groundwork for an emergency fence between the jagged Alpine peaks at its Italian border. To stop the feared hordes, the Swiss are threatening to call out the army
(yes, Switzerland has an army) [And an AirForce, too.].
The Germans and the French, meanwhile, are joining an effort to extend “crisis” checks already in place at various European Union borders despite early signs that the region’s migrant flows may be coming under control.
Some Austrian politicians are backing a possible fence at the Brenner Pass despite their historic ties to Alto Adige, a still largely German-speaking enclave in Italy ceded by Vienna in the early 20th century.
...
“We can’t be the social security for Africa,”
said Rudi Federspiel, a regional leader in the right-wing Freedom Party of Austria from the bordering province of Tirol.
“Most of these people are Muslims, not Roman Catholics.”
Those migrants already in Austria, he insisted, are causing serious social problems:
“We have rapes. Rapes in the city. Rapes all over the place.
Because [Muslim] men don’t accept women. . . . They are not on the same level” as Europeans.
...
If a massive wave of migrants does come, local politicians say they will be distributed to communities across the region rather than housed in one big camp if they cannot cross the border. But some in this quaint community of gingerbread-house-like villages and Alpine ski resorts are fretting that their clean, quiet streets may turn into a “new Idomeni” — a reference to the squalid refugee camps on Greece’s sealed border with Macedonia.
“The population is scared because they see all the footage from Greece . . . and fear this might happen here, too,” said Elmar Morandell, transport chief for the region’s Association of Trades and Services.
Any fence, Austrian officials say, remains a contingency — a barrier that will go up only in the event of a major migrant surge. But on a continent where freedom of movement and open borders became the linchpin of the E.U., critics say that such moves are part of an effort to effectively fence off Europe’s south, ensuring that if large numbers of migrants again arrive this year, they would be largely corralled at entry points in countries such as Italy and Greece.
[1.1]
“Economic unity and political unity are twins:
one cannot be born without the other following,”
said Friedrich List, the famed German economist and nationalist.
Again and again, history has proven List right.
[1.2]
Economic union leads inexorably to political union.
The left has always understood this.
The right never does, until too late.
[1.3]
When Hamilton created a free-trade zone across 13 states,
a strong U.S. central government was baked in the cake.
Bismarck used a customs union, the Zollverein,
to harness Germany under Prussia’s whip hand.
[1.4]
And thus the European Coal & Steel Community of the 1950s led to
a Common Market, a European Community,
today’s European Union
and tomorrow’s Euroland.
There, the 12 nations that are today surrendering their national currencies to adopt the “euro”
will enjoy all the liberty and independence of Rhode Island.
[1.5]
For Europe there may be no turning back.
The patriot’s vision of DeGaulle,
of a Europe of fatherlands “from the Atlantic to the Urals,” is dead.
The alternative vision of a managerial elite,
of a socialist superstate that they shall run, has triumphed.
Despising sovereignty, worshipping power,
the nameless, faceless technocrats of the EU have just taken a Great Leap Forward.
[1.6]
France, Germany and Italy, who are exchanging their money for the euro,
are surrendering control of monetary policy and, with it,
control of fiscal policy and national destiny.
Should a recession hit Italy, Rome will be in a straight jacket,
unable to run a deficit or devalue the lira.
Italy will have less freedom to act in her national interest than Argentina
in her current crisis.
[1.7]
Nevertheless, a prediction: This European superstate will not endure,
but break apart on the barrier reef of nationalism.
For when the hard times come,
patriots will recapture control of their national destinies
from Brussels bureaucrats to whom no one will ever give loyalty or love.
[1.8]
Who, after all, would fight or die for the EU?
[1.9]
There are other reasons to believe the new Europe will fail.
Unlike America, where 90 percent of the people speak English,
the 300 million people in the new eurozone speak a dozen languages.
And while she remains affluent,
Europe’s dynamism is fading away along with her industrial base.
Militarily, as we saw in Kosovo, the new Europe is pathetic.
Fifty-six years after Hitler died in his bunker,
Europe requires American troops to defend her.
Europe is a gated community in an increasingly desperate global neighborhood.
[1.10]
Each year brings a new European threat to “go it alone.”
But these have begun to ring as hollow as the threats of children to run away from home,
who never quite get around to it.
As for Europe’s plan to build a 60,000-soldier Rapid Reaction Force to replace NATO,
one is tempted to say: For heaven’s sake, get on with it!
2. The demographic issues
[2.1]
Most important, Europe is dying.
There is not a single nation in all of Europe
with a birth rate sufficient to keep its population alive, except Muslim Albania.
In 17 European nations,
there are already more burials than births, more coffins than cradles.
[2.2]
Between 2000 and 2050, Asia, Africa and Latin America
will add 3 billion to 4 billion people – 30 to 40 new Mexicos! –
as Europe loses the equal of the entire population of
Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Germany.
By 2050, the median age in Europe will be 50,
nine years older than the oldest nation on earth today, Japan.
One in 10 Europeans will be over 80.
And who will take care of these scores of millions of elderly,
before the Dutch doctors arrive at the nursing home?
[2.3]
Immigrants is the answer,
immigrants already pouring into Europe in the hundreds of thousands annually
from the Middle East and Africa,
changing the character of the Old Continent.
Just as Europe once invaded and colonized Asia, Africa and the Near East,
the once-subject peoples are coming to colonize the mother countries.
And as the Christian churches of Europe empty out, the mosques are going up.
[2.4]
Yet, even as great nations like France, Germany, Italy and Spain
grow weary of the strain of staying independent, sovereign and free,
the sub-nations within are struggling to be born again.
In Scotland, Wales, Ulster, Corsica, the Basque country and northern Italy
are secessionist movements not unlike those that broke up
Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union into [24] independent nations.
[2.5]
If the alternative is the atheist-socialist superstate rising in Europe,
patriots everywhere should cheer the sub-nations.
For the world struggle that succeeds the Cold War is between patriots and globalists,
a struggle where loyalty to transnational regimes will one day
be considered treason to the nation.
On Jan. 1, 2002, the day that euro coins and banknotes entered into circulation,
my column, “Say Goodbye to the Mother Continent,”
contained this pessimistic prognosis:
“This European superstate will not endure,
but break apart on the barrier reef of nationalism.
For when the hard times come,
patriots will recapture control of their national destinies
from Brussels bureaucrats to whom no one will ever give loyalty or love.”
The column described what was already happening.
“Europe is dying.
There is not a single nation in all of Europe
with a birth rate sufficient to keep its population alive, except Muslim Albania.
In 17 European nations,
there are already more burials than births, more coffins than cradles.
“Between 2000 and 2050, Asia, Africa and Latin America
will add 3 billion to 4 billion people — 30 to 40 new Mexicos! —
as Europe loses the equal of the entire population of
Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Germany.
“By 2050, the median age in Europe will be 50,
nine years older than the oldest nation on earth today, Japan.
One in 10 Europeans will be over 80.
And who will take care of these scores of millions of elderly,
before the Dutch doctors arrive at the nursing home?
“Immigrants is the answer,
immigrants already pouring into Europe in the hundreds of thousands annually
from the Middle East and Africa,
changing the character of the Old Continent.
Just as Europe once invaded and colonized Asia, Africa and the Near East,
the once-subject peoples are coming to colonize the mother countries.
And as the Christian churches of Europe empty out, the mosques are going up.
“Yet, even as great nations like France, Germany, Italy and Spain
grow weary of the strain of staying independent, sovereign and free,
the sub-nations within are struggling to be born again.
In Scotland, Wales, Ulster, Corsica, the Basque country and northern Italy
are secessionist movements not unlike those that broke up
Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union into [24] independent nations.”
What was predicted, 14 years ago, has come to pass.
Migrants into Germany from the Middle and Near East reached 1 million in 2015.
EU bribes to the Turks
to keep Muslim migrants from crossing over to the Greek islands,
thence into the Balkans and Central Europe,
are unlikely to stop the flood.
My prediction that
European “patriots will recapture control of their national destinies,”
looks even more probable today.
Prime Minister David Cameron, who almost lost a referendum on Scottish secession,
is demanding a return of British sovereignty from the EU
sufficient to satisfy his countrymen,
who have been promised a vote
on whether to abandon the European Union altogether.
Marine Le Pen’s anti-EU National Front ran first
in the first round of the 2015 French elections.
Many Europeans believe she will make it into the final round
of the next presidential election in 2017.
Anti-immigrant, right-wing parties are making strides all across Europe,
as the EU is bedeviled by a host of crises.
Europe’s open borders that facilitate free trade
also assure freedom of travel to homegrown terrorists.
Mass migration into the EU is causing member nations
to put up checkpoints and close borders.
The Schengen Agreement on the free movement of goods and people
is being ignored or openly violated.
The economic and cultural clash
between a rich northern Europe and a less affluent south —
Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal —
manifest in the bad blood between Athens and Berlin,
endures.
Northern Europeans grow weary of repeated bailouts
of a south that chafes at constant northern demands for greater austerity.
Then there is the surge of sub-nationalism,
as in Scotland, Catalonia, Flanders, and Veneto,
where peoples seek to disconnect from distant capitals that no longer speak for them,
and reconnect with languages, traditions and cultures
that give more meaning to their lives
than the economics-uber-alles ideology of Frau Angela Merkel.
[Here, if the news reports are accurate, Mr. Buchanan is at least part in error.
The complaints of the Scots, it is reported,
are that the London government is not giving them enough in welfare.
How economically viable Scotland would be,
without the taxes paid by the financial gnomes of the City,
I don't know, but my guess is that the Scots want more government benefits
than they are willing to pay for.]
Moreover, the migrants entering Europe, predominantly Islamic and Third World,
are not assimilating
as did the European and largely Christian immigrants to America of a century ago.
The enclaves of Asians in Britain,
Africans and Arabs around Paris,
and Turks in and around Berlin
seem to be British, French and German in name only.
And some of their children are now heeding the call to jihad against the Crusaders invading Muslim lands.
The movement toward deeper European integration
appears to have halted, and gone into reverse,
as the EU seems to be unraveling along ideological, national, tribal and historic lines.
If these trends continue, and they seem to have accelerated in 2015,
the idea of a United States of Europe dies, and with it the EU.
And this raises a question about the most successful economic and political union in history — the USA.
How does an increasingly multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural United States
avoid the fate to which Europe appears to be headed,
when there is no identifiable racial or ethnic majority here in 2042?
Are our own political and racial divisions disappearing,
or do they, too, seem to be deepening?
Excerpts from various news articles,
mainly from the New York Times
Here is a collection of excerpts from various news articles,
mainly from the New York Times .
(The emphasis has been added by the author of the current blog.)
Is it not truly remarkable that the Times in its coverage of immigration from Africa
only discusses the problems from which the Africans are attempting to flee,
while it ignores the problems, of higher unemployment and social unrest,
that they will introduce into Europe?
And the same applies to the remarks of Pope Francis quoted in
the article about the ship disaster off the Italian coast.
France's worst urban violence in a decade exploded for a ninth night on Friday
as bands of youths roamed the immigrant-heavy, working-class suburbs of Paris,
setting fire to dozens of cars and buildings
while the government struggled over the violence
and the underlying frustrations fueling it. (2005-11-05)
The euro zone jobless rate rose to a record 12.1 percent in March 2013. (2013-05-01)
Record youth unemployment is emerging as
the most urgent problem in the euro zone,
if the political rhetoric of recent days is any measure.
But leaders are struggling to come up with effective ways
to prevent jobless young people in countries like Spain and Greece
from becoming a lost generation and source of social upheaval. (2013-05-15)
Having floated for at least two days in the choppy Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe,
a rickety trawler overstuffed with African migrants fleeing war and poverty
was nearing a Sicilian island, not even a quarter-mile away.
...
Nearly 500 people are estimated to have been on board ...
The grisly deaths again underscored
the dangerous, desperate efforts by many migrants from Africa and the Middle East
to reach Europe by sea,
while also renewing criticism of European immigration policy.
Pope Francis,
who visited the island in July to draw attention to the plight of migrants,
expressed sadness and outrage over Thursday’s fatal accident.
“The word disgrace comes to me,” the pope said during an audience,
calling for prayers on behalf of the dead and their families.
“Let us unite our efforts so that similar tragedies do not happen again.
Only a decided collaboration among all can help to stop them.”
...
Veronica Lentini, who works with the International Organization for Migration in Lampedusa [one of those they Times article quoted;
notably not anyone opposed to this "migration" (or invasion!)]
...
But finding a unified immigration policy is difficult,
given that member states have different attitudes and policies toward immigrants.
And many advocates for migrants said
the European Union had done too little to open legal channels for people to migrate,
especially those who are not wealthy or educated,
and also needed to improve resettlement programs for refugees and asylum seekers.
“Even people who aren’t engineers have reasons to want to have a good life,
and come to Europe, a place of safety and opportunity,” [Huh? What about the high unemployment rate?]
said Philip Amaral, advocacy and communications coordinator
for the Brussels-based Jesuit Refugee Service Europe.
For many, he said, “the only option is to take a risky trip.” (2013-10-04)
It was the third ship of the night to head toward the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa packed to the brim with migrants seeking a better life in Europe. The first, filled with Syrians, arrived about 10 p.m. The second, carrying Eritreans, slipped in at 2 a.m.
Jobless Rate in Euro Zone Stays at Record
By JACK EWING
FRANKFURT — The economic recovery in the euro zone is feeble. Employment continues to suffer. And the patient is likely to be getting around on crutches for months if not years to come. That was essentially the prognosis from two key economic indicators published Thursday and from economists assessing the latest conditions.
The number of people out of work in the countries using the euro currency rose slightly in September, while inflation fell more than expected — both signs of a weak economy.
Neither indicator necessarily contradicts other more positive economic news recently, notably an end to the recession in Spain. But the data, which showed euro zone unemployment stuck at a record high of 12.2 percent and inflation at its lowest level in four years, served as a reminder that a long convalescence lies ahead for Europe.
“It doesn’t mean we’re back in recession,” Marie Diron, an economist who advises the consulting firm Ernst & Young, said of the jobs number. “It’s consistent with growth, but weak growth.”
The unemployment rate is an especially critical economic indicator in Europe. Years of austerity and joblessness have fed radical political parties and strained democracy throughout the euro zone. The longer that record unemployment persists, the harder it will be for political leaders to contain discontent and push through changes in labor regulations and other rules that are needed for the region to grow more strongly.
“This is a race against time,” said Nicholas Spiro, managing director of Spiro Sovereign Strategy in London, a consultancy. “Can these economies recover fast enough before an anti-Europe backlash brings down the single currency project?” (2013-11-01)
Five years after the economic crisis struck the Continent,
youth unemployment has climbed to staggering levels in many countries:
in September,
56 percent in Spain for those 24 and younger,
57 percent in Greece,
40 percent in Italy,
37 percent in Portugal and
28 percent in Ireland.
For people 25 to 30, the rates are half to two-thirds as high and rising.
Those are Great Depression-like rates of unemployment,
and there is no sign that European economies, still barely emerging from recession,
are about to generate the jobs necessary to bring those Europeans into the work force soon,
perhaps in their lifetimes.
Dozens of interviews with young people around the Continent
reveal a creeping realization that the European dream their parents enjoyed is out of reach. (2013-11-16)
[With reports (like the one above) of employment problems in Europe rife,
it seems all but criminal to me to encourage yet more immigration into Europe
of people who will only be competing for jobs with those already in Europe.]
“We are strict on immigration, but this is not a war on cultures.
Our idea is to protect our welfare system.”
[I don't care to call it a war,
but I do believe that the culture that Europeans, of various nationalities,
have built is very, very valuable and well worth preserving.
I have nothing against Muslims,
indeed from what little I know about Islam it sounds like a fine religion
(but that doesn't mean I prefer it to Christianity),
but there are certainly many parts of the world where they have full control.
It is true that there is much conflict in those lands,
but at least one source of conflict, the schism between Sunnis and Shiites,
is most certainly not the fault of the West or Christianity,
but an internal feud within Islam,
just as the European religious wars that followed the Reformation
were an internal feud within Christianity, between Protestants and Catholics.
In any case, I have a "live and let live" attitude towards cultures:
Let the Muslims preserve and develop the glories of their religion and culture
in the lands which they have controlled since, say, 1500,
while Europeans and Christians
preserve the glories of European and Christian culture in Europe.
To me, the people on both sides
who desire to change the culture in distant (to them) regions of the world
are the extremists.
When I grew up, there was a common saying:
"When in Rome, do as the Romans do."
It has been a long time since I heard anyone say or write that.]
[I]t is astounding how much the continent’s elites are dedicating their political and cultural energies to
“free trade,” climate change or empowering EU institutions —
these goals being pursued with the fervor of a moral panic,
as though they were panaceas to what ails us.
In contrast, there is little effort to mobilize society to fight against low fertility
so as to avoid
the fundamental, intractable problems associated with it.
All the economic and political fiddling in the world is pointless
if the biological basis of society is collapsing.
[Oh, but many of those problems
will only appear in the future.
For the present,
why not worry about, say, equal pay for women,
which will benefit those alive today.
Who cares about the world their children (if they had any!)
will inherit?]
...
But if [some people's ideals] were to entail
welcoming hundreds or thousands of immigrants from Africa and the Middle East every day, this is simply not compatible with the continued existence of European nations.
Stopping people trying to come here is, for me [Ron Liddle], the better solution
(and is basically the one advanced by the Evil Nazi Hellhound, Katie Hopkins).
Make it clear there will be no rescues at all
and that anyone who succeeds in reaching Europe
will be sent straight back to where they came from.
These traffickers set out expecting that there is a good chance they will be rescued,
so remove that possibility from the equation.
Use armed boats to drive back the traffickers.
Make it even more clear that
refugees who apply for asylum legally will always take precedent over
those who come here in a cast-iron bath tub captained by some predatory Tunisian scumbag.
Those who come illegally by boat will never get asylum.
This stuff all works, and we have the Australian example for evidence.
Their prime minister, Tony Abbott, introduced this tough approach in 2014.
In the previous two years 35,000 people arrived in Australia
from Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.
And there were countless deaths at sea.
Six months of the get-tough policy
and there was not a single ‘people-smuggling venture’, as the Australians put it.
[The second] difference between immigration in Europe and America:
Namely, the scale of the migration that may be coming to Europe over the next fifty years.
That scale could be set by the staggering growth of Africa’s population, and the native European population’s stagnation and decline. Consider how much Latin American immigration has roiled U.S. politics (hello, Mr. Trump), when there are just over 300 million people in the United States and just under 600 million in all the countries to our south — a ratio that’s unlikely to change much over the next few generations.
Then consider: Today there are 738 million Europeans (500 million of them in the E.U.) and just under 1.2 billion Africans. In 2050, according to the latest U.N. projections, Europe’s population will have dipped to (an aging) 707 million, while Africa’s population will be 2.4 billion. By 2100, there will be 4.4 billion Africans – two of every five human beings overall — and Europe’s population will be just 646 million.
The Mediterranean is far wider than the Rio Grande, but this is still a wildly unstable demographic equilibrium. What’s more, as Noah Millman pointed out recently in Politico, northward migration – a kind of African “scramble for Europe” – is likely to increase whether African states thrive over this period or collapse. Desperation might drive it, but so might rising expectations, the connections forged by growth and globalization. (Many Africans currently braving the Mediterranean, for instance, seem to be ambitious, educated citizens from countries with growing economies, not just refugees.)
If Africans were to migrate to Europe at the rate Mexicans have migrated to America since 1970, Millman notes, by 2050 a quarter of Europe’s population would be African-born. That probably won’t happen: The birthrate projections will be off, the migration patterns will be different, European countries will impose restrictions that actually succeed in keeping people out.
But something significant is going to happen. In some form, a Eurafrican future is on its way. And judging by the stumbling response to a few thousand migrants at Calais, Europe is deeply unprepared.
[What a God-awful prospect.
Turning Europe into the mess that Africa now is.
Just in a cooler climate.
In any case, kiss European culture goodbye.
Hello, "gangsta rap". Goodbye, Bach, Handel, et al.]
The leaders and bureaucrats of the European Union (EU) are fortunate that they have largely disarmed the citizens of EU member states. If the citizens of Europe had personal weapons, all officials at all levels of the increasingly authoritarian EU organization might well be under fire — and rightly so – for causing the horde of unwanted, unneeded, and non-assimilable migrants that is now inundating Europe.
The migrants will produce further lawlessness,
a debilitating level of societal tensions,
enormous increases in the expense of social services and public housing,
and contribute nothing worth having to the nations of the EU.
The migrants also will wreck the status quo in EU security
as the many hundreds of thousands of incomers
are mixed with a goodly number ISIS and al-Qaeda organizers, recruiters, fighters, and suicide attackers
who will make the job of EU security and intelligence services
even more undoable.
Indeed, the only upside of the migrant flood is that elected and appointed EU officials will feel proud of themselves for spending the money of the EU’s wildly overtaxed citizens for a “humanitarian purpose” that, to anyone with commonsense, clearly carries the seeds of terrorism, the end of the EU, fascism, and civil war.
EU leaders also should be deliriously happy that most of the region’s media are
urging that Europe take in as many of the migrants as possible
and are
keeping their readers from asking why the migrants are flowing into Europe.
Many European politicians and pundits
are blaming Bashir al-Assad and the Syrian regime.
The British finance minister George Osborne, for example, said last weekend that
the world needs to focus on dealing with the migrant “problem at source,
which is this evil Assad regime and the ISIL (Islamic State) terrorists,
and you need a comprehensive plan for a more stable, peaceful Syria.”
Mr. Osborne must be crazed.
And then there is the Pope Francis who wants to get all the migrants possible into Europe and wants Catholics to defy the law and put them up. The mindless, do-gooding interventionism of this Pope will not be sated until he helps to turn the EU into a gigantic Greece, and ensures the impoverishment of the rest of the Western world, while the Vatican’s art collection and property holdings remain intact.
The major and nearly only cause of the EU’s overwhelming influx of unwanted migrants is the relentless interventionism of the EU, NATO, and the United States in the Islamic world, and their refusal to win the wars they start there. Although such Western interventionism has been a constant since 1945, it has become the tool of first resort since the attacks of 9/11 and it is the direct and primary cause of the migrant tide now destabilizing the EU. From 1996 until this day, the four following realities lead in a direct, unambiguous, and causal line to the current migrant onslaught.
[See the original article for the four reasons.]
...
EU and U.S. leaders have forgotten —
perhaps they never learned —
that the West’s only obligation is to itself,
its preservation, and its posterity.
It has no obligation to commit suicide
in an effort crafted and supported by
the academy’s nation-killing, diversifying, and multicultural charlatans,
[and] their enablers in the media
...
...
EU leaders ought, for a change, give some thought to Europe’s survival
and station their member-states’ navies along the coast of North Africa
and order them to forcibly return refugee-filled boats to the shore,
even as they direct the EU bureaucracy
to prepare the migrants’ return to their home states.
European media and policymakers have correctly realized that the present refugee crisis is an enormous challenge to the assumptions that have guided the continent for decades, to the point of potentially breaking the European Union. But apparently they still are not prepared to confront the specifically religious revolution now under way.
This issue places me in a strange and unprecedented position. Over the past decade, I have written about the presence of Islam in Europe, arguing repeatedly that the threat of “Islamization” is overblown. Overall, I have argued, Europe’s Muslim population is presently around 4.5 percent of the whole, which by U.S. standards is in no sense a massive minority presence. It might rise to 10 or 15 percent later in the century, but the change will be gradual, allowing plenty of time for assimilation.
My moderate position on this has been heavily criticized by various right-wing outlets such as FrontPage Magazine, a publication with which I agree on basically nothing. On most issues, I find FrontPage’s tone hysterical and alarmist. Now, suddenly, I myself have to criticize that magazine for being insufficiently concerned about Islam. These are strange times.
Here is the problem. Germany recently declared that it would take 800,000 refugees this year. That is a very large figure, but as the government points out, that is only one percent of the population of 80 million. In FrontPage, Daniel Greenfield stresses that the issue is much graver than it appears, since the refugees are mainly young men, who will massively raise the Muslim presence among that section of Germany’s population. Other writers like Christopher Caldwell also raise alarms about the massive security threats posed by the present crisis. He warns that European politicians “are trying to pass off a migration crisis as a humanitarian crisis. It may be on the verge of turning into a military crisis.”
...
[Some German] officials are explicitly saying that something like this influx will continue more or less indefinitely. Sigmar Gabriel has also said that “we could certainly deal with something in the order of a half a million for several years.” If the present experience is anything to go by, that is likely to mean something like a million a year for how long? Five years? Ten?
However obvious this may be to say, there is no logical end to this process, even if the Syrian crisis ended tomorrow. As it becomes known that Germany is so open to migrants, that fact offers an irresistible invitation to anyone living in a country roiled by violence or economic crisis, which basically means most lands from Libya to Pakistan. There is no terminal point at which the nations sending migrants would ever run out of candidates seeking refuge and asylum. And even that projection takes no account of the likely spread of open warfare and terrorism into Turkey and Egypt in the coming decade.
So let’s put those numbers in context. Germany’s population is about a quarter that of the United States, so multiply all those refugee figures by four. Imagine if a U.S. president declared that the country would commit itself to taking between two and four million new refugees and migrants, annually, over the coming years—and that over and above other forms of immigration. Even given the diversity of the U.S. population, that would represent an inconceivably large social transformation.
Germany is also describing an epochal religious revolution. That point might not be clear from reading the very extensive articles in mainstream German media that discuss every aspect of the strains posed by the crisis, but somehow never mention the words Islam or Muslim. That reticence is understandable, given that Germans, more than any people, do not want to appear nativist or racist. But despite the taboos, that religious element is critical.
...
Many of the present migrants are not in fact Syrian, and they adopt that description to win the sympathy of host nations (a thoroughly understandable decision). Many are in fact Iraqis and Turks, Libyans or Afghans. All those groups, incidentally, come from countries with very young populations and extremely high fertility rates, so their numbers would likely grow rapidly in their new European homes.
Before 2015, Germany’s Muslim population was around 5 percent of the whole, potentially rising to 7 percent or so by 2030. If the present wave of migrants and refugees continues, that figure could well be 15 or 20 percent by the 2030s, and it would be rising fast. For the first time ever, we would seriously be looking at something like the Islamization of Europe that has been a nativist nightmare for a generation. And in the German context, that process would be squeezed into just a couple of decades. That is radically destabilizing.
Personally, I don’t believe that the presence of Islam in Europe need of itself be harmful or even negative, nor that it would necessarily lead to violence. But I am quite certain that numerical changes on this scale do portend a cultural and social revolution without precedent.
Shouldn’t the Germans, and other Europeans, at least be allowed to discuss this openly?
[Who on earth would try to prohibit the open discussion of this issue,
an issue that is in my opinion among the most important of those facing the West today,
along with global warming.]
