Ukraine war: Russian speakers reject the 'language of the enemy' by learning Ukrainian - by David GORMEZANO

One of the stated goals of Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine was defending Russian-speaking populations who were allegedly being persecuted by Ukrainian nationalists. Ironically, since the start of the war, Russian speakers in Ukraine have been signing up for classes to improve their Ukrainian-language skills.

In Vyshhorod in the suburbs of Kyiv, around 12 women greet each other in the town hall where they have gathered on a Saturday morning. Dora and Roxanna fled Donbas in 2014 after the Donetsk and Luhansk regions were captured by pro-Russian militias armed and financed by Vladimir Putin’s government. Tatiana and Larissa are Russian and have lived in Ukraine for many years. And Olga, a Belorussian national, has lived in Kyiv since 2020.

All Russian speakers, they are here for the same reason: they want to improve their Ukrainian-language skills. Tatiana admitted finding the Ukrainian alphabet difficult. She has been coming to classes for three years and has made some progress. But “In everyday life, I still use Russian,” she said. Wearing a T-shirt in the colours of the Ukrainian flag, Roxanna said that Russian is her mother tongue. “I learned Ukrainian at school in Donetsk, but it’s not my language of choice. No one ever forced us to speak Ukrainian.”

Read more at: Russian speakers reject the 'language of the enemy' by learning Ukrainian

Hungary: Orbán and US right to bond at Cpac in Hungary over ‘great replacement’ ideology - by Flora Garamvolgyi and Julian Borger

Hungary’s nationalist leader, Viktor Orbán, will be the star speaker at an extraordinary session of America’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) to be held in Hungary this week, in an effort to cement bonds between the radical right on both sides of the Atlantic under the banner of the “great replacement” ideology.

In a speech on Monday, Orbán made explicit reference to the ideology, which claims there is a liberal plot to dilute the white populations of the US and European countries through immigration. Increasingly widespread among US Republicans, the creed was cited by the killer who opened fire on Saturday in a supermarket in a predominantly black area of Buffalo, New York.

Speaking in Buffalo on Tuesday, Joe Biden called it a “perverse ideology” and “a lie”.

“I call on all Americans to reject the lie. I condemn those who spread the lie for power, political gain and for profit,” Biden said. “We’ve now seen too many times the deadly and destructive violence this ideology unleashes.”

Read more at> Orbán and US right to bond at Cpac in Hungary over ‘great replacement’ ideology | Viktor Orbán | The Guardian

U.S. Republicans: Flirting With Fascism

Now that Congressional Republicans have seen fit to expel Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) from her leadership post in the U.S. House of Representatives, the warning lights are flashing red for American democracy.

Like their German counterparts in the 1930s, Donald Trump’s Republican enablers in the U.S. Congress have lots of intelligence but no principles.

Read more at: U.S. Republicans: Flirting With Fascism - The Globalist

EU - Poland Nationalism: The rise of right-wing nationalism: from Poland to Polanyi – by Karin Pettersson

The introductory chapter in Anne Applebaum’s book Twilight of Democracy describes a new year’s party Applebaum and her husband organised in 1999. It took place in their house in the Polish countryside and gathered many of the country’s leading liberals and conservatives. The spirits were high, the future was bright—a highway towards freedom and open markets.

Two decades later, that dream has shrivelled like a dried apple. Poland is ruled by the right-wing nationalists of the Law and Justice Party and liberals of the Applebaum brand are their anathema. Half of the friends at the 1999 party no longer talk to her or her husband. The book is a melancholic ode to a lost world and an attempt to understand what happened to it.

Read more at: The rise of right-wing nationalism: from Poland to Polanyi – Karin Pettersson

Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems - by George Monbiot

NEOLIBERALISM

Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?

If you do have the capability to distinguish between "Right and Wrong",  and  are not too preoccupied with other "things" to do, it might be worth your while to read this rather lengthy, but most informative article, to help you understand why the world is in the total mess it is.  Have fun, and don't get too depressed. Tomorrow might bring better tidings - R.M - EU-Digest

Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?

So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.

Never mind structural unemployment: if you don’t have a job it’s because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you’re feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it’s your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.

Among the results, as Paul Verhaeghe documents in his book What About Me?  in which he describes his main concern how social change has led to this psychic crisis and altered the way we think about ourselves.re :epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, loneliness, performance anxiety and social phobia. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Britain, in which neoliberal ideology has been most rigorously applied, is the loneliness capital of Europe. Unfortunately we are all neoliberals now.

The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria, they saw social democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the gradual development of Britain’s welfare state, as manifestations of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism.

In The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, Hayek argued that government planning, by crushing individualism, would lead inexorably to totalitarian control. Like Mises’s book Bureaucracy, The Road to Serfdom was widely read. It came to the attention of some very wealthy people, who saw in the philosophy an opportunity to free themselves from regulation and tax. When, in 1947, Hayek founded the first organisation that would spread the doctrine of neoliberalism – the Mont Pelerin Society – it was supported financially by millionaires and their foundations.

With their help, he began to create what Daniel Stedman Jones describes in Masters of the Universe as “a kind of neoliberal international”: a transatlantic network of academics, businessmen, journalists and activists. The movement’s rich backers funded a series of thinktanks which would refine and promote the ideology. Among them were the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute. They also financed academic positions and departments, particularly at the universities of Chicago and Virginia.

s it evolved, neoliberalism became more strident. Hayek’s view that governments should regulate competition to prevent monopolies from forming gave way – among American apostles such as Milton Friedman – to the belief that monopoly power could be seen as a reward for efficiency.
Something else happened during this transition: the movement lost its name. In 1951, Friedman was happy to describe himself as a neoliberal. But soon after that, the term began to disappear. Stranger still, even as the ideology became crisper and the movement more coherent, the lost name was not replaced by any common alternative.

At first, despite its lavish funding, neoliberalism remained at the margins. The postwar consensus was almost universal: John Maynard Keynes’s economic prescriptions were widely applied, full employment and the relief of poverty were common goals in the US and much of western Europe, top rates of tax were high and governments sought social outcomes without embarrassment, developing new public services and safety nets.

But in the 1970s, when Keynesian policies began to fall apart and economic crises struck on both sides of the Atlantic, neoliberal ideas began to enter the mainstream. As Friedman remarked, “when the time came that you had to change ... there was an alternative ready there to be picked up”. With the help of sympathetic journalists and political advisers, elements of neoliberalism, especially its prescriptions for monetary policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter’s administration in the US and Jim Callaghan’s government in Britain.After Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took power, the rest of the package soon followed: massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services. Through the IMF, the World Bank, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organisation, neoliberal policies were imposed – often without democratic consent – on much of the world. Most remarkable was its adoption among parties that once belonged to the left: Labour and the Democrats, for example. As Stedman Jones notes, “it is hard to think of another utopia to have been as fully realised.”

It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice and freedom should have been promoted with the slogan “there is no alternative”. But, as Hayek remarked on a visit to Pinochet’s Chile – one of the first nations in which the programme was comprehensively applied – “my personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism”. The freedom that neoliberalism offers, which sounds so beguiling when expressed in general terms, turns out to mean freedom for the pike, not for the minnows.

Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty.

As Naomi Klein documents in The Shock Doctrine, neoliberal theorists advocated the use of crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted: for example, in the aftermath of Pinochet’s coup, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina, which Friedman described as “an opportunity to radically reform the educational system” in New Orleans.

Where neoliberal policies cannot be imposed domestically, they are imposed internationally, through trade treaties incorporating “investor-state dispute settlement”: offshore tribunals in which corporations can press for the removal of social and environmental protections. When parliaments have voted to restrict sales of cigarettes, protect water supplies from mining companies, freeze energy bills or prevent pharmaceutical firms from ripping off the state, corporations have sued, often successfully. Democracy is reduced to theatre.

Another paradox of neoliberalism is that universal competition relies upon universal quantification and comparison. The result is that workers, job-seekers and public services of every kind are subject to a pettifogging, stifling regime of assessment and monitoring, designed to identify the winners and punish the losers. The doctrine that Von Mises proposed would free us from the bureaucratic nightmare of central planning has instead created one.

Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it rapidly became one. Economic growth has been markedly slower in the neoliberal era (since 1980 in Britain and the US) than it was in the preceding decades; but not for the very rich. Inequality in the distribution of both income and wealth, after 60 years of decline, rose rapidly in this era, due to the smashing of trade unions, tax reductions, rising rents, privatisation and deregulation.

The privatisation or marketisation of public services such as energy, water, trains, health, education, roads and prisons has enabled corporations to set up tollbooths in front of essential assets and charge rent, either to citizens or to government, for their use. Rent is another term for unearned income. When you pay an inflated price for a train ticket, only part of the fare compensates the operators for the money they spend on fuel, wages, rolling stock and other outlays. The rest reflects the fact that they have you over a barrel.

Those who own and run the UK’s privatised or semi-privatised services make stupendous fortunes by investing little and charging much. In Russia and India, oligarchs acquired state assets through firesales. In Mexico, Carlos Slim was granted control of almost all landline and mobile phone services and soon became the world’s richest man.

Financialisation, as Andrew Sayer notes in Why We Can’t Afford the Rich, has had a similar impact. “Like rent,” he argues, “interest is ... unearned income that accrues without any effort”. As the poor become poorer and the rich become richer, the rich acquire increasing control over another crucial asset: money. Interest payments, overwhelmingly, are a transfer of money from the poor to the rich. As property prices and the withdrawal of state funding load people with debt (think of the switch from student grants to student loans), the banks and their executives clean up.

Sayer argues that the past four decades have been characterised by a transfer of wealth not only from the poor to the rich, but within the ranks of the wealthy: from those who make their money by producing new goods or services to those who make their money by controlling existing assets and harvesting rent, interest or capital gains. Earned income has been supplanted by unearned income.

Neoliberal policies are everywhere beset by market failures. Not only are the banks too big to fail, but so are the corporations now charged with delivering public services. As Tony Judt pointed out in Ill Fares the Land, Hayek forgot that vital national services cannot be allowed to collapse, which means that competition cannot run its course. Business takes the profits, the state keeps the risk.

The greater the failure, the more extreme the ideology becomes. Governments use neoliberal crises as both excuse and opportunity to cut taxes, privatise remaining public services, rip holes in the social safety net, deregulate corporations and re-regulate citizens. The self-hating state now sinks its teeth into every organ of the public sector.

Perhaps the most dangerous impact of neoliberalism is not the economic crises it has caused, but the political crisis. As the domain of the state is reduced, our ability to change the course of our lives through voting also contracts. Instead, neoliberal theory asserts, people can exercise choice through spending. But some have more to spend than others: in the great consumer or shareholder democracy, votes are not equally distributed. The result is a disempowerment of the poor and middle. As parties of the right and former left adopt similar neoliberal policies, disempowerment turns to disenfranchisement. Large numbers of people have been shed from politics.

Chris Hedges remarks that “fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the politically inactive, the ‘losers’ who feel, often correctly, they have no voice or role to play in the political establishment”. When political debate no longer speaks to us, people become responsive instead to slogans, symbols and sensation. To the admirers of Trump, for example, facts and arguments appear irrelevant.

Judt explained that when the thick mesh of interactions between people and the state has been reduced to nothing but authority and obedience, the only remaining force that binds us is state power. The totalitarianism Hayek feared is more likely to emerge when governments, having lost the moral authority that arises from the delivery of public services, are reduced to “cajoling, threatening and ultimately coercing people to obey them”.

Like communism, neoliberalism is the God that failed. But the zombie doctrine staggers on, and one of the reasons is its anonymity. Or rather, a cluster of anonymities.

The invisible doctrine of the invisible hand is promoted by invisible backers. Slowly, very slowly, we have begun to discover the names of a few of them. We find that the Institute of Economic Affairs, which has argued forcefully in the media against the further regulation of the tobacco industry, has been secretly funded by British American Tobacco since 1963. We discover that Charles and David Koch, two of the richest men in the world, founded the institute that set up the Tea Party movement. We find that Charles Koch, in establishing one of his thinktanks, noted that “in order to avoid undesirable criticism, how the organisation is controlled and directed should not be widely advertised.

The words used by neoliberalism often conceal more than they elucidate. “The market” sounds like a natural system that might bear upon us equally, like gravity or atmospheric pressure. But it is fraught with power relations. What “the market wants” tends to mean what corporations and their bosses want. “Investment”, as Sayer notes, means two quite different things. One is the funding of productive and socially useful activities, the other is the purchase of existing assets to milk them for rent, interest, dividends and capital gains. Using the same word for different activities “camouflages the sources of wealth”, leading us to confuse wealth extraction with wealth creation.

A century ago, the nouveau riche were disparaged by those who had inherited their money. Entrepreneurs sought social acceptance by passing themselves off as rentiers. Today, the relationship has been reversed: the rentiers and inheritors style themselves entre preneurs. They claim to have earned their unearned income.

These anonymities and confusions mesh with the namelessness and placelessness of modern capitalism: the franchise model which ensures that workers do not know for whom they toil; the companies registered through a network of offshore secrecy regimes so complex that even the police cannot discover the beneficial owners; the tax arrangements that bamboozle governments; the financial products no one understands.

The anonymity of neoliberalism is fiercely guarded. Those who are influenced by Hayek, Mises and Friedman tend to reject the term, maintaining – with some justice – that it is used today only pejoratively. But they offer us no substitute. Some describe themselves as classical liberals or libertarians, but these descriptions are both misleading and curiously self-effacing, as they suggest that there is nothing novel about The Road to Serfdom, Bureaucracy or Friedman’s classic work, Capitalism and Freedom.

For all that, there is something admirable about the neoliberal project, at least in its early stages. It was a distinctive, innovative philosophy promoted by a coherent network of thinkers and activists with a clear plan of action. It was patient and persistent. The Road to Serfdom became the path to power.

Neoliberalism’s triumph also reflects the failure of the left. When laissez-faire economics led to catastrophe in 1929, Keynes devised a comprehensive economic theory to replace it. When Keynesian demand management hit the buffers in the 70s, there was an alternative ready. But when neoliberalism fell apart in 2008 there was ... nothing. This is why the zombie walks. The left and centre have produced no new general framework of economic thought for 80 years.

Every invocation of Lord Keynes is an admission of failure. To propose Keynesian solutions to the crises of the 21st century is to ignore three obvious problems. It is hard to mobilise people around old ideas; the flaws exposed in the 70s have not gone away; and, most importantly, they have nothing to say about our gravest predicament: the environmental crisis. Keynesianism works by stimulating consumer demand to promote economic growth. Consumer demand and economic growth are the motors of environmental destruction.

What the history of both Keynesianism and neoliberalism show is that it’s not enough to oppose a broken system. A coherent alternative has to be proposed. For Labour, the Democrats and the wider left, the central task should be to develop an economic Apollo programme, a conscious attempt to design a new system, tailored to the demands of the 21st century.

 EU-Digest - Neoliberalism : "The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by its private citizens" - Ale

Europeans 'radically' reassessing view on world order due to COVID-19, research finds

Drawing on data from nine EU member states — which together comprise two-thirds of the bloc's population — research from the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) found that 63 per cent of Europeans are in favour of more EU cooperation to tackle the pandemic and other issues of global significance.

The authors found that although some commentators predicted that the pandemic would lead to a surge in Euroscepticism and nationalism as borders were shut, the opposite is true. Large majorities of people in all surveyed countries said that they are now more firmly convinced of the need for further EU cooperation than they were before the crisis.

Read more at: 
Europeans 'radically' reassessing view on world order due to COVID-19, research finds | Euronews

EU in turmoil: Is Europe Falling Apart?

Populism, nationalism, and internal griping are deeply, perhaps irreparably, damaging EU and NATO alliances.

Read more at:
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/europe-falling-apart

Nationalism: From Trump to Johnson nationalists are on the rise, backed by billionaire oligarchs

From Trump to Johnson, nationalists are on the rise – backed by billionaire oligarchs

Read more at: 

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European Elections: Understanding the far-right populists: focus on their political message - ocus on their political message by Daphne Halikiopoulou

 Conventional wisdom is that the rise of the far-right populists is down to a popular cultural backlash. What’s really happened is they have broadened their support through a civic-nationalist narrative.

One in four Europeans votes populist, according to the Guardian. Though we might have expected Europe’s economic crisis—with its resulting mounting inequalities—to lead more plausibly to the rise of left-wing populist parties, pledging to cater for voters’ material concerns, it has been far-right populists, with their promise to restore ‘national sovereignty’ in the name of ‘the people’, which have capitalised more effectively on social insecurities. The French Rassemblement National (RN) (formerly Front National), the Dutch Freedom Party (PVV), the Austrian Party for Freedom (FPÖ), the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Italian Lega have all mobilised voters across the political spectrum through their populist-nationalist platforms.

Far-right populists have fared particularly well in recent electoral contests within their domestic arenas and are projected to gain about a third of the seats in the new European Parliament. Depending on who joins, Matteo Salvini’s initiative to create a successful far-right populist family, the European Alliance of People’s and Nations, threatens to make this one of the largest groupings in the European Parliament, challenging the European project at its core.

Read more: Understanding the far-right populists: focus on their political message • Social Europe

White Nationalism: Born in America is now a global terror threat

Read more at:  

http://theconversation.com/white-nationalism-born-in-the-usa-is-now-a-global-terror-threat-113825

The US and Britain: The party is over

Read more at;
https://www.theglobalist.com/us-uk-trump-brexit-nationalism-isolationism/

EU: The EU parliamentary elections a battle for Europe's sou! - by Meriam Sorace

Read more at :
https://www.socialeurope.eu/european-parliament-election

EU -2019: Need for more EU coordinated and unified action to combat populism and nationalism

High time for EU to stop brown
-nosing US Trump Administration

In an OpEd Robert Steenland , an associate at the Warsaw-based Centre for International Relationsexpressed the need for more unity in the EU during these troubling times, with a US president who has gone amok.

US president Donald Trump's Christmas surprise caught its allies off-guard when he decided to pull out of Syria and withdraw half of his troops from Afghanistan. It also prompted his defence secretary to resign.

He also caused global market tremors by suggesting he would like to fire the Federal Reserve's president amidst a government shutdown.

As Carl Bildt, the former foreign minister of Sweden, tweeted on 25 December: ''The US president is now in open conflict with the US Congress, the US Federal Reserve, the US secretary of defence, China, the EU, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and a couple of others. Otherwise it's OK.''

These events and earlier actions by Trump suggest a gloomy outlook for 2019, in which more political and economic trouble can be expected.

"An ally should be dependable'', French president Emmanuel Macron has said.

However, Trump's actions again show the US under his leadership is increasingly unreliable: he had not consulted European allies, nor the Syrian Kurds, who are key to fighting the Islamist militant group Isis.

It all follows a pattern of deteriorating transatlantic ties.

Trump has repeatedly picked fights with other Western leaders, questioned Nato's existence, and even called Brexit a great development.

Earlier rash decisions to quit the Paris climate agreement and Iran nuclear deal, not to mention his political brawling during the last G7 summit with Western friends, also left European allies perplexed.

Instead, Trump choose to please authoritarian leaders such Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who now has a free rein in attacking the Syrian Kurds, with a recent military build-up at its borders showing 2019 could bring more regional instability.

With his 'America First' doctrine, Trump openly defies the multilateral world order the US built after WW2. His trade wars threat to pull out from the WTO underline this.

The mercantilist behaviour shows he perceives global trade as a zero-sum game, in which one either benefits or loses.

His recent political hooliganism on the Federal Reserve chief harmed the value of US companies.

So much for the credit he has claimed for having boosted US commerce!

With most moderates in Trump's administration having been kicked out or resigned, 2019 could be an even more turbulent year for transatlantic ties and global stability.

This all the more so, given that his room to manoeuvre in domestic policy will be constrained after the opposition Democrats took over of the House.

The Kremlin could be encouraged to make a new military adventure in Ukraine and to increase election meddling abroad, with 2019's European Parliament elections a likely target.

The changing international environment implies the need for the EU to step up its responsibility.

However, to show strength externally, the EU must overcome divisions internally over migration and eurozone reform, which have polarised the bloc and impaired its ability to take effective decisions.

Ambitious compromises from national leaders are needed, who must avoid thinking in Trump's zero-sum terms.

This requires fixing the eurozone's unfinished architecture, which divided north and south, and finding a permanent solution for the migration issue, which split west and east.

Member states should stick together in a world where the EU has been left to fend for itself.

To maintain influence, more effective decision-making capabilities are needed - with less room for national vetoes - in defence and foreign policy.

This year's EU parliament elections could prove crucial here, given the downfall of mainstream parties and rising nationalism and populism.

This requires a broad coalition of pro-EU parties from the left to the right who support a strong and united EU.

It is not so much about ideology here, but about survival and being prepared for a less stable world.
Working together is needed for the sake of pragmatism or even realpolitik.

In addition, the EU should continue bringing together like-minded countries and stand firm on principles of free trade, an open society, and multilateralism.

If populists and nationalists really care about national sovereignty, they ought to realise they can only maintain and leverage real sovereignty in a strong EU that cooperates closely with its allies.

The alternative of an ever more divisive (and lonely) EU in a multipolar world could imply we will end up being rule-takers, rather than rule-setters.
 
EU-Digest

The Liberal Delusion - by Marc Saxer

There’s this prevalent idea that we have to take a firm stand against right-wing populism. Yet all the anti-populist hashtags, public un-invites, and goodwill gigs of recent years have done nothing to halt its rise. 

Clearly, we need a more effective strategy, and the path to finding it begins by asking a simple question: whose values are actually being defended here?

For as long as it is part of cultural class warfare, the fight against the far right will never be won. The frontline runs between middle-class groupings, which is why – even in these times of extreme inequality – the debate focusses on questions of morals and identity, not wealth distribution.

For much of recorded human history, questions about who we are and where we are going have been the domain of priests and philosophers. Today, however, it is academics and creatives who are providing answers.

Read more: The Liberal Delusion • Social Europe

France: World War I commemoration: Macron rebukes nationalism at commemoration = by David Jackson

Bells tolled across France and Europe on Sunday as President Donald Trump and other global leaders gathered to honor the dead of World War I and heed its harsh lessons to prevent conflicts.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who has criticized Trump's "America First" foreign policy, decried excessive "nationalism" at the root of World War I and successive conflicts.

"Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism," Macron told a gathering of world leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Trump. “Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism by saying, ‘Our interest first, who cares about the others?’ "

Hosting an event to mark the centennial of the armistice that ended World War I, Macron told fellow leaders they have a "huge responsibility" to defeat modern forces that threaten a "legacy of peace" from the two world wars of the past century.

"I know there are old demons coming back to the surface," the French president said. "They are ready to wreak chaos and death."

Macron did not refer specifically to Trump, who occasionally frowned during the speech.

Trump did not respond to Macron publicly. 

During a speech later Sunday at a World War I-era cemetery, Trump praised the French leader for hosting the event he called "very beautiful" and "well done."

In defending "America First," Trump has often said the United States needs to address its own needs. air."

Read more: France -World War I commemoration: Macron rebukes nationalism at commemoration

POLAND: Nationalist. Marching With Government Officials

Via euronews: Polish leaders hold joint march with nationalists on 100th anniversary of Independence Day

Read more;
https://www.euronews.com/2018/11/11/polish-leaders-hold-joint-march-with-nationalists-on-100th-anniversary-of-independence-day

USA: Opinion: Politically motivated violence in Trump′s America is no surprise

Let's start with an important caveat. The investigation into the potentially explosive devices – which were mailed to the homes of former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to CNN addressed to former CIA director John Brennan, and other leaders –is still unfolding. So it is not prudent to dwell at this point on the possible nature and background of what appear to be attempted terrorist attacks, which came on the heels an explosive device that was sent to liberal billionaire George Soros on Monday.

But it is both possible and necessary to say that the deeply toxic, increasingly partisan American political climate has at least provided fertile ground for anyone even contemplating such politically motivated attacks. It is also both possible and necessary to say that US President Donald Trump has been the key driving force behind the unprecedented deterioration of the political climate in this country.

He ran and won his presidential race on a campaign based on fearmongering and ad hominem attacks against political rivals and the news media, which he has repeatedly labeled as the enemy of the people. He has a long-established track record of using cavalier language and vague threats against anyone who expresses disagreement of criticism of his policies or statements. Just a few examples in Clinton's case: allowing raucous crowds to chant "lock her up," proposing the "Second Amendment people" can do something to stop her, suggesting her Secret Service personnel no longer carry guns and "let's see what happens to her." It's not a leap of logic that some die-hard Trumpers could see his statements as tolerance, if not an outright call, for politically-motivated violence.

After the death of a counterprotester at a right-wing march in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump – who just a day ago casually and without garnering huge media attention described himself as a "nationalist" at a Texas rally – initially hesitated to offer a clear condemnation of the right-wing extremist perpetrator.

At his campaign rallies, he has repeatedly insinuated violence against the media and opponents. And less than two months ago, in a closed-door meeting with evangelicals, Trump warned the group of "violence" from the left should Democrats win the midterm election.

Trump's rabble-rousing rhetoric is based on a winning-at-all-cost attitude that accepts no criticism and knows no compromise. While that is a problematic disposition in a person, it is a dangerous disposition in the president of the world's most powerful nation.

In the brief three years since his arrival onto the political scene he has single-handedly transformed the Republican Party into his own political fighting machine. And as a consequence, he has fomented and ramped up the already existing deep divisions in the country to an extent hardly deemed possible. That some of his supporters – or anyone at all, for that matter – may interpret the president's rhetoric and behavior as a call to exert violence against his political detractors should surprise no one.

Read more: Opinion: Politically motivated violence in Trump′s America is no surprise | Opinion | DW | 24.10.2018

EU Politics: Why Macron’s ‘Third Way’ Is EU’s Best Option - by John Lloyd

The largest question in democratic politics in Europe is: who’s in charge?

The issue was illuminated in the latest standoff in the European Parliament, where the body voted on Wednesday to sanction Hungary for its illiberal policies. And in Sweden, where the far-right did well enough in last Sunday’s election to ensure that its borders are tightened. And in Britain, where a preliminary accord on Brexit now seems nearer.

The ideals of a more united European Union demand clarity. A decision has to be made on whether or not a European federation, erasing sovereignty in participating nations, is desired, and by whom.

It had seemed easy before our times. Treaties – of Augsburg in 1555 and of Westphalia in 1648, arrived at after years of carnage – groped towards a principle that nation states were the natural order of international relations. The treaties didn’t stop wars or dismantle all empires, nor did they usher in an era of religious tolerance. But they meant that countries which could claim the allegiance of citizens within defined borders were the basic unit of power.

Who was in charge? Clearly the ruler – increasingly, as time went by, put in place by the will of the people. The older states, like Britain and France, were experienced in this. The newer creations, as Germany and Italy in the latter half of the 19th century, strove to catch up. In the 20th century, anti-imperialist momentum, promoted most of all by the United States, rolled on and created many new nations. Nation-statism became the prevailing world order.

But the greater carnage of World War Two and Nazism impelled a few thinkers and activists in devastated Europe to see nationalism not as a prophylactic against war, but as a prime cause of it. Economic interdependence and slow but steady integration of governments would take the place of the “balance of power” among states which had so clearly failed.

Power would no longer be precariously balanced, but unified in one pacific entity: a federal Europe, dedicated to peace, with contiguous nations joining on condition they observed the rules of the club: cooperation, democracy, equality, freedom of speech, the market and the press and respect for civil society. The values of Western liberalism, incarnate in a new kind of governing power – which had renounced the old kind of power.

However, a club has rules, borders which cannot be breached. Hungary, a member since 2004, was this week judged to have crossed them. A report by a Green Party member of the European Parliament from the Netherlands, Judith Sargentini, found that the Hungarian administration, led by the increasingly authoritarian Viktor Orban, had comprehensively violated the independence of the judiciary, the press and the academy, and had become massively corrupt. As a result, the parliament voted – for the first time in its history – to sanction Hungary by depriving it of voting rights in the EU’s Council of Ministers.

Orban, denouncing the move as one cooked up before the debate, was wholly defiant, saying that Hungary “will not accede to this blackmail.” It was, he said, an attack on the Hungarian state and people by countries that had allowed floods of migrants to enter Europe, and were trying to force Hungary to do the same.

Orban sees himself as upholding true Christian values, bearing the flame of a militant Christianity gone flabby in West European hands, and indifferent to, even encouraging of, an invasion of Europe by mainly Muslim immigrants. He will continue, and confidently – since the parliament’s vote to censure must be approved by the leaders of the 28 member states (including a still-Brexiting Britain), and there he has allies, above all in Poland and Italy, who can vote to veto it.

The Hungarian standoff has illuminated, cruelly but necessarily, the issue of authority.

The question is also one put before the Union by Emmanuel Macron, the leader most clearly opposed to the nationalist-populists. In pressing for a more robust advance to closer European integration, only the French president has put the issue squarely: who’s for federation? And who isn’t?

Macron’s fellow leaders had voted for a euro currency which was as much a mechanism for greater integration as a new means of exchange, agreeing to “ever closer Union” – while at the same time recoiling from a more strongly integrated banking and financial order which, the German governing center-right parties and the northern nations fear, would mean more irresponsibility from the southern countries.

Orban counts on these divisions. He sees the present strengthening of the nationalists, understands the reluctance of the Union to do more than make declarations, and meanwhile bides his time.

Macron, who has forced the pace and the need for a decision, has, however, also provided a third way between integration and the exit chosen by the United Kingdom. He has proposed a Europe of concentric circles, with an integrating core and increasingly weak adhesion to the Union in those states locating themselves in the spaces further from the center.

This is the way that should be taken: one which accommodates those countries that see the Union as an embryo state, and those which see it as a free trade arrangement with better inter-state cooperation on selected issues. Were it adopted, it would liberate the EU from its self-created dilemma – how to get the Union closer where many of the members wish to remain at a distance. They wish to do so because they wish to retain national sovereignty – as, it seems, the people who vote for them do. The nation state makes clear who is in charge; the European Union has deferred the issue to a future ideal state.

Orban grasps that one large truth, and has erected his semi-authoritarian rule upon it. Meanwhile, the Brits have chosen. The Hungarians, Poles and Italians have moved into the hostile camp. Others wish to remain ambiguous. But the time for ambiguity is running out.

Read more: Why Macron’s ‘Third Way’ Is EU’s Best Option • Social Europe

USA: Trump Destructivism: Way Beyond Russia - by Michael J. Brenner

For all the attention currently paid to Russia, let us not forget the long list of other places in the world where the current government of the United States has not been upholding the causes of political freedom, democracy and national sovereignty.

1. In ENGLAND

Trump aggressively promoted Boris Johnson as a brilliant leader, despite the latter’s direct challenge to Prime Minister Theresa May.

2. In SCOTLAND

Trump lashed out at Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish National Party, with a barrage of highly personal insults.

3. In GERMANY

Trump has striven to weaken the position of Chancellor Angela Merkel through his constant denunciations of her judgment and domestic policies.

4. In POLAND

the Trump administration has lent its full support to the ultra-nationalist, anti-democratic government.

5. In HUNGARY

it has done the same in support of Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

6. In SAUDI ARABIA

Trump warmly embraced Crown Prince Mohammed bin-Salman despite his shake-down of other Saudi leaders and dangerous crack-down on the Shi’ite community.

7. In ECUADOR

Washington has encouraged current Prime Minister Lenin Moreno to pursue a vendetta against former President Rafael Correa because of the latter’s social democratic policies and unwillingness to kow-tow to U.S. business interests.

8. In NICARAGUA

the United States is backing the campaign to overthrow the democratically elected government of Daniel Ortega.

9. In HONDURAS

the United States strong-armed the OAS not to penalize the government of President Juan Orlando Hernandez for its blatant rigging of the election last year.

10. In IRAN

Trump leads a thinly concealed campaign to overthrow the current government.

11. In YEMEN

the United States has chosen sides in a civil war that involves participation in a homicidal air campaign carried out by Saudi Arabia and other outside parties.

12. In the PHILIPPINES

Trump personally has bolstered President Rodrigo Duterte in his program to build a lawless autocracy.

13. In SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

the United States is actively involved in the internal politics of a dozen or so countries.

Read more: Trump Destructivism: Way Beyond Russia - The Globalist

Globalization: Backlash and the rise of populism

For the complete report click on the link:
https://www.socialeurope.eu/the-globalization-backlash-its-both-culture-and-the-economy-stupid