WE ARE GOING TO EXPLORE A FEW CONTRADICTORY EVENTS IN THIS TRAGIC COMEDY IN WHICH WE ARE PAWNS IN PAIN AND KINGS IN GLORIOUS CLOTHES...

WE VOTE, WE CONTROL OUR DESTINY BUT WE DON'T. 

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By viewing the governance of Europe from the period after the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the illusion of the end of the Cold War (1991) to the present day through the prism of Gestalt psychology*, we realise that Europe lives in fear and deception vis-à-vis the United States of America.

For European leaders, opposing the United States amounts to suicide

Mohamed Lamine KABA, July 09, 2024

After the Second World War in 1945 – in which the United States has called itself a winner – while the world was living in relative peace, it was at that very moment (in peacetime) that the United States created an aggressive military alliance: the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), in the ranks of which are the United States and its European allies. Since its creation in 1949, NATO has distinguished itself by pushing fear and terror unto the rest of the world. The true winner of the Second World War, i.e. Russia (USSR), was able to stand as a pole of protest against the unipolar world order of the NATO West. Today this has resulted in the multipolarity of the BRICS group.

Having established itself as the «land of blood» since 1914 through fratricidal wars, Europe is searching for a so-called ‘guarantee of security’ offered by NATO, becoming the doormat of the United States rather than gaining protection. Despite this state of affairs, European leaders continue to believe that opposing the United States could harm the interests and general well-being of Europe. However, globally, the United States no longer has the monopoly on coercive power to even offer this guarantee. The relationship between Europe and the United States has always been based on the legitimisation of neocolonialism and was founded via the manipulation of all international institutions (for example the UN and its specialised and affiliated institutions). The two actors share economic and political ties, solid security, which are all based on the exploitation of the oppressed peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America. However, in recent years tensions have emerged over various issues such as trade policies, defence spending, climate change agreements and diplomatic relations. Overwhelmed by the speed of recent events in the global arena, European leaders seem disoriented by fear of the supposed potential consequences of their tense relationship with the United States and they dwell on the importance of maintaining a cooperative partnership – even if it resembles modern-day slavery. This hesitation in Europe’s self-determination vis-à-vis the United States fuels deep crisis regarding the unity of Europe and its sovereignty on the world stage. While multipolarity is growing at an increasingly accelerated pace, Europe’s leaders still find it difficult to choose between freeing themselves from the unbridled unipolar world order and integrating into the new multipolar world order, as they are guided by the foreign policy of the United States.

The international arena is complex and changing

The role once played by the United States in world affairs is one of the main reasons why European leaders view opposition to the United States as ‘suicide’ for Europe is. The United States was a major economic power and a key player in international politics; for decades it wielded considerable influence over global decision-making processes, but now it has little influence. These times are over, as the new centres of power are, within the scope of BRICS, undermining the bastions of American-Western hegemony. From the point of view of European leaders, the paradox is that, by antagonising or alienating the United States, European countries risk losing crucial economic opportunities, security partnerships and diplomatic alliances that, in their eyes, are vital for their own stability and prosperity. What they still ignore in the 21st century is that the new multipolar world order, advocated for by BRICS, does not stand against the West or any other entity, rather it offers a fairer and more inclusive world.

In the same way that European leaders understand that unity among Western nations is essential to address common challenges such as terrorism, cybersecurity threats and geopolitical instability – of which they are the sole architects – they must also understand that they are not alone on planet Earth, «an obligation to cohabit despite everything», as Raymond Aron said. While the transatlantic partnership between Europe and the United States has historically served as a cornerstone of Western solidarity and cooperation, European politicians still maintain that any fracture in this relationship could weaken the collective ability of Western nations to effectively approach common threats. In other words, keeping the global majority under the heel of the Western minority. This shows that this solidarity and cooperation are organised around looting, the spoliation of resources and the deterioration of trade terms. All of humanity regrets the dark periods when the collective West exercised global power and the entire earth is now rising against the lords of unbridled unipolarity, i.e. the West.

Furthermore, European leaders appear to be underestimating the realities of the broader geopolitical landscape, which includes emerging powers such as China and Russia cooperating and operating within BRICS for greater influence on the global stage. In this context, maintaining a moribund transatlantic alliance of a NATO nature becomes even more critical for Europe’s strategic interests and security. By standing alongside the United States, European countries could stumble while trying to navigate complex geopolitical dynamics and would no longer be able to preserve their own position in an increasingly competitive global environment.

To conclude, we can infer that while disagreements arise between Europe and the United States on certain issues, European leaders still perceive it as strategically unwise to take a confrontational stance toward their American counterparts. They therefore value the importance of preserving a cooperative relationship with the United States to advance the common and unhealthy objectives of the collective West, which consist of protecting mutual interests and defending Western values on the international stage. A moribund alliance of NATO unipolarity can no longer dissuade anyone from the positive dynamics of the multipolar BRICS alliance. With the new multipolar world order, the world is continuing to move into the future with or without the Western minority.

Mohamed Lamine KABA – Expert in geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Humanities and Social Sciences, Pan-African University, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

https://journal-neo.su/2024/07/09/for-european-leaders-opposing-the-united-states-amounts-to-suicide/

THIS WAS PUBLISHED WHEN BIDEN WAS STILL PRESIDENT. AT THE TIME BLINKEN AND SULLIVAN WERE RUNNING THE SHOW. NOW, TRUMP IS RUNNING THE SHOW AND THE EUROPEANS ARE FRETTING EVEN MORE... CAN THEY CHOOSE PEACE OVER WAR? 

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Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder – review
This article is more than 14 years old
Neal Ascherson on why Auschwitz and Siberia are only half the story

e found himself treading upon "bottomless, unsteady earth" crawling with small flies. The novelist Vasily Grossman, then a Red Army soldier, was walking across the still-settling wasteland where the extermination camp of Treblinka had stood until nine months before. As Timothy Snyder writes, Grossman "found the remnants: photographs of children in Warsaw and Vienna; a bit of Ukrainian embroidery; a sack of hair, blonde and black". The loose soil, flung around by peasants digging for Jewish gold, was still "throwing out crushed bones, teeth, clothes, papers".

The history of modern Europe, and especially of its fearsome 20th century, is like that field: unsteady under the scholar's foot. Forgotten stuff works its way to the surface. Some historians use metal-detectors to snatch out something flashy. Others do patient archaeology, relating the tiniest object in each stratum to its context. Snyder is the second kind.

In this book, he seems to have set himself three labours. The first was to bring together the enormous mass of fresh research – some of it his own – into Soviet and Nazi killing, and produce something like a final and definitive account. (Since the fall of communism, archives have continued to open and witnesses – Polish, Ukrainian, Belarussian especially – have continued to break silence.) But Snyder's second job was to limit his own scope, by subject and by place. He is not writing about the fate of soldiers or bombing victims in the second world war, and neither is he confining himself to the Jewish Holocaust. His subject is the deliberate mass murder of civilians – Jewish and non-Jewish – in a particular zone of Europe in a particular time-frame.

The time is between about 1930 – the start of the second Ukraine famine – and 1945. The zone is the territory that lies between central Poland and, roughly, the Russian border, covering eastern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic republics. Snyder's "Bloodlands" label is jarring, a title those beautiful lands and those who now live there do not deserve. But it's true that in those years and in those places, the unimaginable total of 14 million innocent human beings, most of them women and children, were shot, gassed or intentionally starved to death.

Snyder's third aim is to correct, radically, the way we remember what happened. To start with, the public in western countries still tends to associate mass killing with "Nazi concentration camps", and with Auschwitz in particular. Stalin is thought to have killed far more people than the Nazis by consigning millions to the gulag. But neither assumption is accurate.

In the Soviet Union, it now appears that, although about a million men and women perished in the labour camps, nine out of 10 gulag prisoners survived. Stalin's great killing took place not in Siberia, but in the western Soviet republics, above all in Ukraine where in the 30s at least four million people died in man-made famines and in the slaughter of the "kulak" peasantry.

In the concentration camps of the Third Reich, a million prisoners died miserable deaths during the Nazi period. But 10 million others who never entered those camps were shot (mostly Jews), deliberately starved to death (mostly Soviet prisoners of war) or gassed in special "killing centres" which were not holding camps at all. At Auschwitz, the overwhelming majority of Jews were taken straight to the gas chambers on arrival. And Auschwitz, terrible as it was, formed a sort of coda to the Jewish Holocaust. By the time the main gas chambers came on line in 1943, most of Europe's Jewish victims were already dead.

Some – the Polish Jews especially – had been gassed in the three killing centres set up on Polish territory: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. But most had been shot and pitched into mass graves by German police units operating far to the east in Ukraine, the Baltics and Belarus, the Einsatzgruppen who moved from village to village behind the front lines of war.

Snyder shows convincingly how the Holocaust emerged. Up to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Hitler's thinking was still about deportation: when the USSR was conquered, all Jews would be driven into its vast wildernesses to labour and die of hunger and disease. But Himmler, impatient, sent in the Einsatzgruppen on the heels of the advancing army to begin the slaughter. By the end of 1941, they had shot a million Soviet Jews.

In December 1941, when the Red Army finally halted the Wehrmacht outside Moscow, Nazi policy changed. Without the conquest of Soviet space, deportation was impossible. So the decision was taken to solve the whole remaining "Jewish problem" by mass murder. As Snyder puts it, "the final solution as mass killing 'was spreading to the west.'" But there more "modern" methods were adopted. The three gassing centres built in occupied Poland, followed by another at Auschwitz-Birkenau, were designed to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe west of the old Polish-Soviet frontier. East of that line, in the lands where most of Europe's Jews had once lived, the job had already been done by the firing-squads.

All this modifies our view of this appalling period. The British, who liberated Belsen, at first located the slaughter in "the concentration camps". Later, as knowledge of Auschwitz spread, came the image of "impersonal" industrialised killing. Now it becomes clearer that at least half the killing was anything but industrialised; it was done by individual human beings aiming their guns at other naked and helpless human beings.

Snyder reinforces this by aligning the Holocaust with the fate of the Soviet prisoners of war. Herded into enormous wired enclosures with little or no food or shelter, they were intentionally left to die. In German-occupied Poland alone, half a million Soviet prisoners starved to death. Counting the hunger victims in besieged Leningrad, this most primitive method of mass killing took something like four million lives in the course of the war.

Snyder insists that the colossal atrocities in his "bloodlands" have to be set inside a single historical frame. To look at them separately – for instance, to see Hitler's crimes as "so great as to stand outside history", or Stalin's as a monstrous device to achieve modernisation – is to let the two dictators "define their own works for us". This, too, is quaggy ground for historians. In the cold war and afterwards, claims that "Stalin was worse than Hitler", or that "communism and fascism come to the same thing", generated more heat than light. But Snyder doesn't fall into such holes. He is saying that both tyrants identified this luckless strip of Europe as the place where, above all, they must impose their will or see their gigantic visions falter.

For Stalin, it was in Ukraine that "Soviet construction" would succeed or fail; its food supplies must be wrested from the peasantry by collectivisation and terror. And foreign influence – which meant above all Polish – must be flamed out of the western borderlands. (Snyder reveals the little-known fact that the Polish minority were the main ethnic victims of the great terror between 1937 and 1938: well over 100,000 were shot for fictitious "espionage".)

This book's unforgettable account of the Ukraine famine shows conclusively that Stalin knew what was happening in the countryside and chose to let it run its course (some 3 million died). For Hitler, too, seizing Ukraine and its produce for Germany was crucial for his new empire. So was smashing Polish identity. Between them, Germany and the Soviet Union tried to behead the nation's elite by murdering 200,000 Poles in the first 21 months of the war.

The figures are so huge and so awful that grief could grow numb. But Snyder, who is a noble writer as well as a great researcher, knows that. He asks us not to think in those round numbers. "It is perhaps easier to think of 780,863 different people at Treblinka: where the three at the end might be Tamara and Itta Willenberg, whose clothes clung together after they were gassed, and Ruth Dorfmann, who was able to cry with the man who cut her hair before she entered the gas chamber." The Nazi and Soviet regimes turned people into numbers. "It is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people."

Neal Ascherson's The Black Sea: The Birthplace of Civilisation and Barbarism is published by Vintage.

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"Ukraine isn’t invited to its own peace talks. History is full of such examples – and the results are devastating" SAYS THE CONVERSATION.

Ukraine has not been invited to a key meeting between American and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia this week to decide what peace in the country might look like. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine will “never accept” any decisions in talks without its participation to end Russia’s three-year war in the country.

A decision to negotiate the sovereignty of Ukrainians without them – as well as US President Donald Trump’s blatantly extortionate attempt to claim half of Ukraine’s rare mineral wealth as the price for ongoing US support – reveals a lot about how Trump sees Ukraine and Europe.

But this is not the first time large powers have colluded to negotiate new borders or spheres of influence without the input of the people who live there. 

Such high-handed power politics rarely ends well for those affected, as these seven historical examples show.

HERE ONE HAS TO BE UNDERSTANDING THAT ZELENSKY ISN'T REPRESENTING UKRAINE... HE IS REPRESENTING AN ILLUSION OF YUCKRAINE WHICH IS NATIONALIST, NAZI, TOTALITARIAN AND DELUDED. ZELENSKY IS A HINDRANCE TO THE PRESENT NECESSITY OF PEACE. THE DYNAMICS OF THE CONFLICT ARE QUITE SIMPLE: THE MINSK AGREEMENTS WERE A FLIMSY DECEPTION BY THE WEST... AND ZELENSKY IS A LIAR.

OVER THE CENTURIES, MANY TREATIES HAVE BEEN SIGNED AND IGNORED BY THE PARTIES INVOLVED, NOT JUST SIGNED ON BEHALF OF OTHERS. IT IS ALSO UNDERSTOOD BY AMERICA AND RUSSIA THAT THEY ARE THE MAIN PROTAGONISTS. UKRAINE IS ONLY THE PLAYING FIELD OF A GREATER GEOPOLITICAL TRAGIC "GAME", DECIDED IN 1917 WHEN AMERICA VOWED TO DESTROY RUSSIA...

THE CONVERSATION CONTINUES:

In the winter of 1884–85, German leader Otto von Bismarck invited the powers of Europe to Berlin for a conference to formalise the division of the entire African continent among them. Not a single African was present at the conference that would come to be known as “The Scramble for Africa”.

Among other things, the conference led to the creation of the Congo Free State under Belgian control, the site of colonial atrocities that killed millions. 

Germany also established the colony of German South West Africa (present-day Namibia), where the first genocide of the 20th century was later perpetrated against its colonised peoples.

It wasn’t just Africa that was divided up this way. In 1899, Germany and the United States held a conference and forced an agreement on the Samoans to split their islands between the two powers. 

This was despite the Samoans expressing a desire for either self-rule or a confederation of Pacific states with Hawai'i.

As “compensation” for missing out in Samoa, Britain received uncontested primacy over Tonga. 

German Samoa came under the rule of New Zealand after the first world war and remained a territory until 1962. American Samoa (in addition to several other Pacific islands) remain US territories to this day. 

As the first world war was well under way, British and French representatives sat down to agree how they’d divide up the Ottoman Empire after it was over. As an enemy power, the Ottomans were not invited to the talks.

Together, England’s Mark Sykes and France’s François Georges-Picot redrew the Middle East’s borders in line with their nations’ interests.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement ran counter to commitments made in a series of letters known as the Hussein-McMahon correspondence. In these letters, Britain promised to support Arab independence from Turkish rule.

Read more: What was the Sykes-Picot agreement, and why does it still affect the Middle East today?

The Sykes-Picot Agreement also ran counter to promises Britain made in the Balfour Declaration to back Zionists who wanted to build a new Jewish homeland in Ottoman Palestine.

The agreement became the wellspring of decades of conflict and colonial misrule in the Middle East, the consequences of which continue to be felt today.

In September 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier met with Italy’s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, and Germany’s Adolf Hitler to sign what became known as the Munich Agreement. 

The leaders sought to prevent the spread of war throughout Europe after Hitler’s Nazis had fomented an uprising and began attacking the German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland. They did this under the pretext of protecting German minorities. No Czechoslovakians were invited to the meeting. 

The meeting is still seen by many as the “Munich Betrayal” – a classic example of a failed appeasement of a belligerent power in the false hope of staving off war.

In 1938, 32 countries met in Évian-les-Bains, France, to decide how to deal with Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany. 

Before the conference started, Britain and the US had agreed not to put pressure on one another to lift the quota of Jews they would accept in either the US or British Palestine.

While Golda Meir (the future Israeli leader) attended the conference as an observer, neither she nor any other representatives of the Jewish people were permitted to take partin the negotiations. 

The attendees largely failed to come to an agreement on accepting Jewish refugees, with the exception of the Dominican Republic. And most Jews in Germany were unable to leave before Nazism reached its genocidal nadir in the Holocaust. 

As Hitler planned his invasion of Eastern Europe, it became clear his major stumbling block was the Soviet Union. His answer was to sign a disingenuous non-aggression treaty with the USSR.

THE TREATED WAS NOT DISINGENUOUS. RUSSIA WAS WEAK, GERMANY WAS STRONG. EVENTUALLY, THE "ALLIES" SECRETLY PERSUADED HITLER TO ATTACK RUSSIA. THIS WAS A WAY TO WEAKEN GERMANY ON THE WESTERN FRONT: 80 PERCENT OF THE GERMAN ARMY GOT DEFEATED BY RUSSIA, LOSING 27 MILLION RUSSIANS IN THE PROCESS. THE SECRET PERSUASION OF GERMANY ATTACKING RUSSIA WAS ALSO A WAY TO DESTROY RUSSIA.... THE WEST ONLY ACHIEVED ITS WW2 SUCCESS BECAUSE OF THE RUSSIAN VICTORIES...

The [Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact], named after Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop (the Soviet and German foreign ministers), ensured the Soviet Union would not respond when Hitler invaded Poland. It also carved up Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres. This allowed the Soviets to expand into Romania and the Baltic states, attack Finland and take its own share of Polish territory. 

Unsurprisingly, some in Eastern Europe view the current US-Russia talks over Ukraine’s future as a revival of this kind of secret diplomacy that divided the smaller nations of Europe between large powers in the second world war. 

With the defeat of Nazi Germany imminent, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and US President Franklin D Roosevelt met in 1945 to decide the fate of postwar Europe. This meeting came to be known as the Yalta Conference.

Alongside the Potsdam Conference several months later, Yalta created the political architecture that would lead to the Cold War division of Europe. 

At Yalta, the “big three” decided on the division of Germany, while Stalin was also offered a sphere of interest in Eastern Europe.

This took the form of a series of politically controlled buffer states in Eastern Europe, a model some believe Putin is aiming to emulate today in eastern and southeastern Europe.

PUTIN WANTS TO PROTECT RUSSIA AS MUCH AS AMERICA WANTS TO PROTCT AMERICA. UKRAINE IS NOT A PLAYER IN THIS GAME, ONLY A PAWN.

SEE ALSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weQDarZcx5A

MORE TO COME...

Gestalt psychology, school of psychology founded in the 20th century that provided the foundation for the modern study of perception. Gestalt theory emphasizes that the whole of anything is greater than its parts. That is, the attributes of the whole are not deducible from analysis of the parts in isolation. 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.