Dispatches from Deena Stryker
Story to Watch: European Glacier Finally Melting
Echoed by its handmaiden the mainstream press, the US government has claimed for years that if only Russia were willing to cooperate, the world would move serenely forward under its benevolent hegemony. In his last month in office, President Obama warned: ‘If we don’t lead, no one else will,’ implying that the rest of the world is either lazy or incompetent.
Unintentionally, that remark may have been the straw that broke the back of the seventy year old European camel diligently carrying America’s load. In a little-noted coincidence on Memorial Day weekend, the much longed for death of America’s Russia-Hater in chief, Zbigniew Brzezinski was immediately followed by two equally longed-for statements and gestures by Europe’s acknowledged leaders, France and Germany: newly elected conservative President Emanuel Macron welcomed Vladimir Putin to Versailles to mark the 300th anniversary of Peter the Great’s visit to Louis XIVth’s mega-palace, while following upon the latest NATO security meeting, German Chancellor Angela Merkel stated unequivocally that Germany and Europe can no longer rely on the US under Donald Trump. His reluctance to recognize the human causes of climate change may be the proximate reason for Mrs Merkel’s up-front declaration, but it marks a sea-change: After seventy years as obedient junior partner to the Empire’s follies, Europe is hearing a definitive statement from a German leader often accused by her voters of tergiversations: “We Europeans need to know we must take our destiny as Europeans into our own hands.”
Expect the corporate media to play this as ‘Russia’s Current Tsar catches up with an illustrious predecessor’s visit to the Palace of Versailles, spelling out the new threat to Europe from the East’. In fact, the reports on RT and France 24 of the Macron/Putin Press Conference could not have been more amusingly different: France’s state media, still following the old script, forced itself to conjure up negatives after every other correctly reported positive change in France’s relationship with Russia, after seventy years of obediently transmitting the American gospel of Russia-as-mortal-enemy.
How ironic that these two ‘passion plays’ should be presented on the United States’ most solemn military holiday: “Memorial Day” in honor of the hundreds of thousands of Americans fallen while dutifully trying to remake the world.
DEENA STRYKER, Associate Editor Born in Philadelphia, Stryker spent most of her adolescent and adult years in Europe, resulting over time in several unique books, her latest being
CUBA: Diary of a Revolution, Inside the Cuban Revolution with Fidel, Raul, Che, and Celia Sanchez
America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World
A Taoist Politics: The Case For Sacredness
She began her journalistic career at the French News Agency in Rome, spent two years in Cuba finding out whether the Barbados were Communists before they made the revolution (‘Cuba 1964: When the Revolution was Young’). After spending half a decade in Eastern Europe, and a decade in the U.S., studying Global Survival and writing speeches in the Carter State Department, she wrote the only book that foresaw the fall of the Berlin Wall AND the dissolution of the Soviet Union (“Une autre Europe, un autre Monde’). Her memoir, ‘Lunch with Fellini, Dinner with Fidel’, tells it all. ‘A Taoist Politics: The Case for Sacredness’, which examines the similarities between ancient wisdom and modern science and what this implies for political activism; and ‘America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World” is a pamphlet about how the U.S. came down from the City on a Hill’.
I am afraid I must disagree with the author. Her optimism is not warranted, at best it is way overstated and premature. Whilst Macron and Putin in the same photo-op is encouraging, everything we see of Macron so far is a confirmation of his firm commitment to the Washington imperial agenda, as bad or worse than Hollande. The press is already talking about how he used Putin’s visit to press him on Syria and gays, two issues where Putin is liable to “look bad” considering the infamous Western propaganda regarding both issues. Ditto with Mrs Merkel, although the method to… Read more »
Absolutely. Macron, as expected, has already made sure he’s more than willing to carry out the script dictated by the US. During his meeting at Versailles he is supposed to have chastised Pres. Putin about his “support for tyrants who use chemical weapons on their own populations.” Plain and clear Western propaganda, if you ask me, and undiplomatic, too. Where have we heard that before? A final question is why on earth does Putin rush to France to subject himself to what anyone with half a brain would see is a trap? Looks bad on Putin and his team. Not… Read more »