Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Europe Part II (November 2015)

Date: 2015.12.04 | Category: in english | Tags:

(the english translation is made by Psy-fi. As per my usual habit, all credits go to him, all errors are reflected back to me)

The primary goal of Russia’s involvement with the Syrian war, an involvement which is now more obvious after the mobilization of its air forces near Latakia during September and the start of air strikes in October, is not only to aid Assad and friends in the Syrian battlefront, but rather to take a political stance inside Europe itself. This stance would, sooner or later (more sooner than later as we see), bring positive results to Russia.

In other words, Russia’s involvement with Syria was aimed more at Europe rather than Syria. Russia, by employing the only western army that fights the Islamic state, can only benefit in European politics. The Paris attacks made this stance clear to even the most skeptic observer. Putin personally gave the order for the Kruz missile air strikes, just a few hours after the Paris attacks. It’s the classic marketing recipe, where Putin personally fishes a salmon with his bare hands, personally pilots a military helicopter, personally dives into the deep frozen water to catch the cross, etc, etc..

You might think that this is way too crude propaganda, however just one look at the relevant photo ops of western leaders will suffice to convince you. Hollande personally orders the hunt for Islamists, Hollande personally prepares a great international alliance against ISIS, Merkel personally supervises the reception of refugees, Tsipras personally visits the “reception centers” of immigrants, etc, etc..

If we consider the stance of western media towards Russia a year ago and their stance now, then the success of Russian diplomacy cannot be understated. This change started during summer, when European leaders more or less told Poroshenko to forget any aspirations of Ukraine joining the EU and abide by the terms of the Minsk agreement, while the Germans were signing an agreement on the new undersea gas pipeline with Russia, making Ukraine even less relevant.

A striking example of this change of stance is no other than the very recent shooting down of the Russian su-24 by the Turkish F-16. Had that happened last year, NATO would not have hesitated to send 20.000 soldiers at the borders between Syria and Turkey. This is the same NATO that sent tanks to the Baltic states without any incident with Russia transpiring.

In stark contrast, when Turkey asked NATOs involvement today, since it is under attack by Russia, NATO officials more or less chided bad Turkey for shooting down a Russian aircraft just like that.

Whatever the end result of the Syrian operation is, Russia’s primary goal -renegotiation with Europe- is already attained to the point where, due to Europe’s internal deficiencies, Russia will become the primary peace-maker in the region on behalf of Europeans.

Showing off their military strength, being tagged as “combat-tested”, the training of their pilots and the maintainance of a non-hostile environment for Russia in the region, all are collateral benefits of the Russian involvement. They are important, yet I consider them secondary.

P.S.
It seems that the situation with Turkey might escalate. There is leaked information that Turkey prepares for an invasion to Syria and Irak in order to “fight” the IS. However, such a move seems to be an initiative of Turkey and thus will not get any support from the west. Besides if Turkey invades Syria, this can only serve to prevent a collapse of the IS, which is already retreating and struggling to hold more defensible positions.

Europe.

5 years after we started the discussion on the dissolution of the European fabric, mainstream media begin to echo the same views.

The Shengen agreement is practically null. Fences along the borders are the latest gadget of choice against the refugee crisis. The European governments and the drunk chickens that pretend to be the European leaders, attempt to manage a very tangible crisis through media and broad proclamations. It’s no surprise that they fail horribly.

Let’s begin with the basics: One of the most prominent European values that everyone struggles in good faith to forget is racial and religious prejudice. Not just today, but non-stop for the last 500 years. From the day Isabella kicked all the non-catholics out of Spain, if you like. The more we tend to put this racism under the rug, the more the rug tends to inflate. All in all the european cultural history is closely linked to racism.

7 years of economic crisis and dissolution of EU structures have taken their toll. The refugee crisis was just the “random” event that happened to turn the scales and make this destruction readily apparent to everyone. And made Junker proclaim that “the Euro without Shengen cannot continue to exist”. No, really?

Immigration.

Whatever Junker says though, is of little matter to the changes that immigration causes to Europe. Underground changes mostly, since most media keep silent about, so we can once again be properly “surprised” with the next unfortunate turn of events.

Take this “innocent” piece of news from the quite progressive and immigrant-friendly Sweden, for instance. The poor minister proclaims that they don’t want more immigrants more or less. One has to read this between the lines, since in Sweden you dont officially exist, unless you have an official address. And if you ever thought of the Swedish as hospitable people who will fling their doors wide open for dark immigrants to walk through, think again. Probably you haven’t read about the very close relations of Sweden with Nazi Germany. In fact, they never even had to get rid of the Nazis after the end of WWII, since Sweden was considered as a “neutral” country during the war.

And this is Sweden, one of the countries that do indeed have one of the most immigrant friendly legislation. Which goes to show, that this legislation owes much to the fact that Sweden is too far away from any major immigration crossroads. Now that things have changed they are having second thoughts apparently.

Another country that oscillates similarly is Germany. Merkel’s CDU is practically split in two and a sizable part of their voting base seems to be fairly disappointed with the open border policy that the chancellor adheres to. In my opinion, what happens with CDU right now is very similar to what happened during Schroeder’s SPD. A big part of the voters cannot relate to the vision of the big consensus.

The German state has already shown weakness in tending to the problems at hand and the first officials’heads have started rolling, with “more able” individuals take up their duties.

What we see here is a mass disillution with mainstream politics from a significant part of society. Some of those people will go to the conservative AfD, some of them will just go home. What I wanted to keep from this situation is the fact that big parts of the traditionally rightwing voters feel now that they are outside of the mainstream political status quo.

Little needs to be said about France. It’s the most racist state of all three by far, and the Paris attacks are just picking up from where the politics we saw for the first time on the big screen during the 90s, with the well-written movie la haine (the hatred), left off.
Since then, about a dozen similar movies have been made as France comes face to face with its colonial, and always racist, past and present. Let’s not forget France’s involvement with many civil wars in its ex-colonies (right now not 40years ago).

I will not comment on other countries, but this doesn’t mean that their policies are very different. For instance here you may read about Italy. How Greece and its first “left” governmenet handled the crisis is well known, and there is no need to repeat it here.

All these changes are basically the repercussions of a very old situation: The answer to the so called social problem. Yes, we Europeans are racist pigs and we project our problems where we know best. But our problem is not the immigrants, rather it’s the social vision that is promised to us by our elites.

The return of the old social problem

Sometime during the second half-time break of the last European war, we have conveniently forgotten that fascism was proposed as a modern solution to the unsolved social problem. Its conceiver, Benito Mussolini, tried to propose a new social structure that could stand ground against the social-marxist sirens that gained in popularity everywhere back in the days.

Today, we can see a similar situation, since the social vision that the elites propose, meets with the resistance of an increasing part of European society. When Merkel speaks of an open border society, she does not only speak of the social “channeling” of the immigrant streams but also of her vision for a new Europe. A vision not much different than the vision the Americans had of Baghdad, or Norman Spinrad’s vision of the future, if you like.

Essentially, this is about the creation of a third world within the first, following the paradigms of 19th century London and Paris. As the middle class is losing ground due to the crisis, it realizes that, contrary to 1995, immigrants will not predictably taking up the role of cleaners, hookers or generally the role of cheap labour easily exploited by that same middle class. Not so much because the elites have a better vision about those immigrants, but more because the middle class has no more power to stay safely segregated from those same immigrants. And they react to this with the same way that they have always reacted historically: Racism.

Right now, a new social alliance is being created. It will gather all the dissatisfied with the old alliance under its wing. This time, however, the left will not be a part of this alliance, since it has totally allied itself with the elite and the existing European project. Personally, I don’t even know if Lepen will be part of this alliance, even though it seems as if she is gathering the very same social forces under her party.

It’s the old and repetitive motive: The bureocracy will declare its inability to manage the events. Events that will just “happen”. But as always, they will tend to “happen” towards one direction. The correct one, of course. The Swedish minister’s approach is quite characteristic: It’s not him who doesn’t adopt the social state and humanitarian values, it’s the fact that there are not enough beds for the poor immigrants.

The fatal flaw of TINA (There Is No Alternative)

TINA has proven to be a great success of the camp that made it famous. It has been the formal narrative of the western elite for the last 20 years and it keeps being used successfully from newbies such as Alexis Tsipras Papadimos.

Despite its major success, TINA has by definition one flaw: It is a negative narrative. And negative narratives can work for many years, but when they finally fail, they tend to fail spectacularly. The reason for this is almost magical: A negative proposal can convince people to temporarily accept it, but it will never convince them to fully internalize it. That is precisely because it lacks a positive message that people can relate to.

This tactic of keeping everyone dissatisfied can work for many years unless the political elite needs the society in order to survive. If that happens, then it will just implode, since no one will run to its defence. Austrian/Hungarian Empire and the Soviet Union are the most characteristic examples of such an implosion. Both regimes had no apparent reason to collapse, yet so they did within a day, without a head turning.

I foresee the same happening to the European union and, in a sense, this might be the least painful of the upcoming events. Because this collapse will not necessarily stop there. It is very likely to spread to the states that were part of the union. This sounds counter intuitive for the collapse of vast a bureaucratic empire such as the one in Brussels. One might expect that such a collapse would increase the power of individual states, yet this is not a given, not by far.

One reason is that those very same states have given way to the bureaucratic empire and the “markets”. The other reason is that we live in a period where society is decreasingly motivated by state power.

This sounds contradictory if we take the amount of modern surveilance of our lives into account, yet it is not so. Let’s consider that the de-facto confirmation of state power comes from the ability of states to mobilize citizens. Western states are currently utterly powerless to convince anyone but a small handful of their members to die for them. This is in stark contrast to, say, 1914 where state power was sky-high.

This is the very strategic void that Russia exploits to win points in the political game. Russia, while itself being a western state, has been through fire and steel after 1990. It took a glimpse of chaos and afterwards it demonstrated with Putin that it did not wish to go back to that model of governance. Putin is predictably using nationalism and the very real encircling attempts of the USA against Russia, to mobilize its citizens. And in this, he has succeeded far more than any other western leader.

Uncle Wallerstein has already explained to us that our liberal world has died 15 years ago. I think the signs are now apparent to everyone. Noone knows what will substitute the old world and what form it will take. However, as Gramsci asserted, in the meantime monsters will emerge.

Apart from bringing up cool philosophical sayings, let’s keep in mind that the form of such monsters is not foreseeable or predetermined.

Such monsters will be formed based on the form of the new world, rather than the views of us, the inhabitants of the old.
Just like the European empires were tagged as monstrous after their collapse. Lord Kitchener was a hero of the British empire during the 1900s. Definitely he was not considered a butcher who drowned the whole of Africa in blood, more on a whim than due to some necessity for the survival of the British empire. The only reminiscence of this famous hero/villain, by the 21th century woman, is maybe some old war recruting posters with a funnily moustached man pointing his finger.