Sunday 13 July 2008


Irish No to Lisbon treaty: Black Friday for Europe
13 June 2008

Commenting on the result of the EU treaty referendum in Ireland, Monica Frassoni and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Co-Presidents of the Greens/EFA group in the European parliament today said:

"The Irish No has once again demonstrated that national referenda are not an adequate instrument to decide European questions. Manipulated and false information on the nature of the treaty and the deliberately inaccessible treaty text made a constructive debate on the true issues impossible.

More than half the Irish decided not turn out and the majority of those that did voted no. They have the democratic right to do so but it is not truly democratic that less than a million people* can decide the fate of almost half a billion Europeans.

The ratification process should go on and at the end we should take stock. We now need an initiative for those countries and political and social forces who are convinced that the EU must be capable of efficient decision-making and must become more democratic and more cohesive. The European parliament has to play a major part in this initiative and is the right place to discuss and decide the way forward.

We cannot go on with the Nice Treaty's EU. EU member states will have to decide if they want to go for a more integrated Europe or if they opt to be members of little more than a free trade area.

We reiterate that we need a short Constitution focussing on selected points that are understandable and relevant to citizens, for example the Charter of fundamental rights, more democratic decision making and more instruments for positive policies. This new initiative should be put to European citizens in a Europe-wide referendum on the same day as the European elections.

EU governments with their ambiguity on Europe are among the main culprits of the Irish No, as they managed to kill the soul of the process that started with the European convention in 2003."

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* The Irish represent less than 1% of the EU electorate. 53.1% of the Irish electorate voted and the NO vote was carried by 109,164. So the Green/EFA statement of "less than a million" should be considered in that light. The decisive number who voted NO were something over 100,000!

Monday 7 July 2008

On the Dangers of Riding Two Horses at Once

As some try to give new life to the rumour that French President Nicolas Sarkozy is an agent for Mossad, something far more interesting attracts my attention. Sarko just doesn't like that arch-Machiavellian and schemer, New Labour's plant at the European Commission, Peter Mandelson, who it is widely known puts the interests of the World Trade Organisation before the EU or its people.

I have consistently argued here that the main players responsible for directing the EU away from its traditional social-democratic policies and pushing it into the anarchic world of 'neo-liberalism' (Thatcherism in another guise) have been Tony Blair, New Labour and their man in Brussels, Peter Mandelson. They have, of course, obtained sterling support from extreme right-wingers in eastern Europe like President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic and the rogue Kacinsky in Poland. Both are great supporters of the so-called free-market policies of 'neo-liberalism' because it is precisely countries like Poland and the Czech Republic which would be the first to benefit from west European businesses shutting down in, say Clermont-Ferrand or the north of England, and relocating in the East where wages would be considerably lower and unions practically non-existent.

And it was the stark policies of 'neo-liberalism', the job losses and consequent insecurity they entail, the tearing-apart of basic utilities like electricity, water and public transport and their sale to private companies at knock-down prices that made the public of France, Holland and Eire say NO in their respective referendums for first the EU Constitution and then the Lisbon Treaty. In France and Eire, neither the public or the farmers wanted an end to the Common Agricultural Policy which, whatever one might think of it, stabilises and guarantees prices to European farmers. Sarko, being first and foremost a French politician, is now beginning to take heed of the political unpopularity of the very 'neo-liberal' policies to which he first gave lip service.


Sarkozy waxwork in Madame Tussauds, Berlin

So it is hardly surprising that France comes into a head-on collision with the 'Anglo-Saxon Economics' of 'neo-liberalism' and its primary mover and shaker in Brussels, Peter Mandelson. Here we can see a fundamental collision of interests between what are essentially the traditional interests of the Anglo-American financial fraternities and their Continental counterparts, the latter now manifest as the Franco-German economic and military alliance, the basic motor behind the creation of what is now the EU.

Britain continues to be viewed with suspicion by that alliance and its supporters as the trojan horse within the EU representing the essential military-economic interests of the Anglo-American partnership and its fraternities. The same partnership which for well over a century has been behind the machinations, maneuverings and conspiracies leading to two world wars against their German competitor and the ultimate global hegemony of the Anglo-American partnership and its modern-day imperialism.

"To annihilate the German threat, the British ruling elites had gambled for high stakes; for over 30 years (1914-45) they had woven a web of financial machinations, international complicities, intelligence conspiracies, diplomatic devilry, military savvy, and inhuman mendacity, and they finally succeeded. This game for Anglo-American supremacy came at the cost of approximately 70 million lives (two world wars): a holocaust whose nature is beyond words. Both conflicts were willed and set off by Britain ... So the West has to think again --to think, in fact, that there is something far worse than Nazism, and that is the hubris of the Anglo-American fraternities, whose routine is to incite indigenous monsters to war, and steer the pandemonium to further their imperial aims."

Preface, p. XIX, Conjuring Hitler by Guido Giacomo Preparata, Pluto Press, 2005.

Despite the inevitable demise of the British Empire and its being subsumed by its heir, the US Empire, the interests of every British government, irrespective of its political colour, is to carry-out the requirements of the Anglo-American fraternities and to serve its military-economic interests. The Anglo-American fraternities are joined at the hip and this is the truth behind the phrase that British politicians sometimes use when they defend the 'special relationship' and the prime-minister-in-waiting, David Cameron, points to by saying that this relationship is in the DNA structure of the Tory Party!

Whoever replaces Mandelson at the Commission when his term is finally over we can be sure that the 'Anglo-Saxon Economics' of Anglo-American 'neo-liberalism' will continue to be served enthusiastically by a new British government. The Franco-German alliance knows this and will tailor the future of the EU appropriately with a likelihood of Euro-sceptic countries like Britain and Eire on an outside second tier and the core countries committed to closer unification such as the Franco-German alliance on the inside.

For too long it has been the purpose of Britain and its Anglo-American fraternities to utterly destroy Germany and to control continental Europe. It was relatively free in the days of the Empire to do practically whatever it liked. As for example when the Bank of England could force the Indian Government to sell it its gold and silver at knock-down prices, destroying Indian agriculture, finally leading to the great Punjab Famine in the 'forties when over 4 Million died and the British Raj didn't bat an eyelid. Naturally, British students of modern European history are not reminded about these things.

Instead they are groomed to perpetuate the monstrous lie of a German responsibility for two world wars. A monstrous lie which is now being finally exposed by writers like G.G. Preparata, confirming what many of us have always suspected: that behind the lies and hypocrisy of Britain's rulers lies the stench of a decayed and unburied corpse.

"The sheer amount of lies perpetrated by the Anglo-American establishment against its public in order to preserve the myth that WWII was a 'good' war, won for a just cause, is incalculable ... In sum the Allied elites have told a story. The story that the Germans have always been disturbers of the peace; they disturbed it once and were punished for it, although a little too harshly. Out of such blundering castigation, an evil force materialized out of nowhere --a force whose evil greatly exceeded the petty severity of the Allies that caused such evil to emerge despite themselves. And, the story goes, the evil of this force grew to be such that a violent global conflict became necessary to uproot it."

"More than a cock-and-bull story, this is an insult. And what is worse, every day more and more people, for the sake of psychological tranquility, choose to believe it. Because individuals, as the loathsome Machiavelli put it in his 'classic' vademecum for subhuman conduct, are 'simple' and willing to trust the word of the constituted authorities. Constituted authorities, which we think embody our will, when in truth they are nothing but high battlements hiding oligarchy and lies, both of which must come to an end."

P. 268, Conjuring Hitler by Guido Giacomo Preparata, Pluto Press, 2005.

Those who adhere to both sides of the argument, both pro- and anti-EU, would do well to study a book like Conjuring Hitler in order to better understand just how it is we find ourselves in the post-911 world today. A world where Britain, though now organically part of a developing European Union, will not give up its military-economic allegiance to the USA, finding itself evermore uncomfortably betwixt and between two power blocs.

Sarkozy may be short on history but his cunning nature has already reminded him that, unlike Britain, he cannot ride two horses at once.

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