Zmiana, Piskorski, and the Case for Polish Liberation
Jafe Arnold
Senior Correspondent/ Eastern Europe
Main image above: Mateusz Piskorski poses in front of a Zmiana flag
[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ut Piskorski has been behind bars for more than nine months, and on February 7th he was sentenced to another three, despite the fact that no official charges, indictment, or evidence have been presented. Zmiana, meanwhile, has to this day still been refused registration as a political party. At the time of this article’s writing, the mass media has launched a new campaign denouncing Zmiana for being “linked to ISIS” on the grounds that one of its leaders is Syrian-born and supports the Palestinian liberation struggle.
What is Zmiana? Who is Mateusz Piskorski? Why are they so feared and repressed by the Polish regime whose ruling party is so hypocritically named Law and Justice? The answers to these two questions are long overdue for Western readers.
In Polish, zmiana means “change.” Zmiana’s first programmatic declaration after its founding in February, 2014 reads: “Change – we all want it! […] Our goal is a change of politics, not a cosmetic surgery, but a deep uprooting of the disgraced structures of the anti-social system. Change means replacing this system with a new order built for the people and by the people. Citizens must once again have control over their destiny and have the final say in public affairs.”
For Zmiana, change means regaining Poland’s sovereignty from the clutches of the US, NATO, and perfidious transnational corporations, and using Polish sovereignty to guarantee dignity, justice, and livelihood to Poles. Only on this basis, Zmiana affirms, can Poland play a peaceful and constructive role in international relations.
“But,” the uninformed but well-intentioned Western reader will ask, “didn’t Poland already regain independence and justice when communism fell?” Zmiana, like nearly half of Poles according to the most extensive surveys, would say “no” or “not exactly.”
Zmiana protests US troops in Poland. Sign reads: “No foreign troops!”
The topic of the People’s Republic of Poland is an entirely unfamiliar one in the West. Perhaps the only “milestone” of the period known to American readers is its overthrow largely contributed to by the “trade union” Solidarity. Of course, the “detail” is omitted that Solidarity was infiltrated and funded to the tune of $10 million by the CIA and itself remains one of the single most scandal-riddled entities in Polish history which subsequently betrayed Polish workers to brutal austerity, privatization, and Western corporations in the blink of an eye. Rather, the history of socialism in Poland is one of a country ruined by war and genocide rebuilt into an industrial power whose wealth was used to guarantee Polish workers socio-economic guarantees unknown to people in the West. The socialist experience in Poland displayed all the gains of 20th century socialism for nation-building and popular welfare. Against all odds, Poland not only re-emerged on the map, but made a comeback as a country in which illiteracy was rapidly eradicated and employment, housing, education, healthcare, leisure, and other socio-economic conditions written off in the West as “privileges” were guaranteed to all Polish citizens by law. In terms that are impossible to understate, within two decades of the Second World War, life expectancy for Poles skyrocketed from 46 in the 1930’s and 25 (!) during the war to 70. Not only was People’s Poland a Poland of reconstruction and attaining new socio-economic and scientific heights, but it was a defining period in which the post-war generations built from scratch a Poland here to stay whose development benefitted not a minority of capitalists, but its working people who played an active role in determining their country’s future and wealth. Despite all of the problems which later plagued Polish socialism, it was a Poland of growth and social justice unparalleled in its history.
After 1989, not only were these socio-economic rights stripped away, but the very foundations that made them viable or in the very least potentially achievable were demolished.
To let Poles speak for themselves on this matter, according to a Pew Research survey, a hefty 43% of citizens over 40 (i.e., those who lived at least two decades in the People’s Republic of Poland) say that Poles are economically worse off now, and a considerable 25% of Poles ages 18-39 say the same. Poles who say life is “about the same” account for another 25%. While this may stand out as less favorable compared to other former socialist bloc countries’ assessments of life under and after socialism, it still speaks volumes, especially in contrast to the ruling elite and the media’s daily slandering of anything and everything in Poland before 1989.
With the collapse of the Polish People’s Republic and Poland’s entry into the Washington-dictated European Union and NATO, Poland did not “regain” sovereignty, much less justice, but forfeited such to the Atlanticist project. Poland was transformed from a country of growth into a country of self-destruction. Every year, college-educated Polish youth emigrate en masse in search of a livelihood only to end up as a cheap labor source for Western corporations. Poland itself, meanwhile, has been de-industrialized, and thus deprived of the capacity to pursue independent and effective social and economic policies which in People’s Poland were guaranteed and, even if not always realized, remained the goal.
On the level of foreign policy, Poland has been encouraged to work against its own interests and security by purposefully aggravating relations with its Eastern neighbors and participating in US wars of aggression. Now, with the deployment of thousands of US-NATO troops, tanks, and missile systems on its soil and the Polish government’s relinquishment of jurisdiction over foreign armed forces on its territory, Poland is de facto under occupation. This occupation is not a mere taxation on Poland’s national budget – it is an undeniable liquidation of sovereignty and inevitably turns the country into a direct target and battlefield in the US’ provocative war on Russia. Mateusz Piskorski admits: “Comparing these two periods, whether we like it or not, it turns out that things are in favor of People’s Poland.” Zmiana’s General Secretary, Tomasz Jankowski, has cogently compared the supposedly “patriotic” Polish regime’s invitation of US-NATO occupation to Duke Konrad Mazowiecki’s invitation of the Teutonic Order to Poland in 1226, a move perpetrated under the pretext of thwarting threats from the East that ended in embroiling Poland in war with its Teutonic “protectors” for two centuries.
In a cogent appeal to uphold Polish sovereignty, Jankowski wrote: “[D]ear compatriots, it’s not the Russians who are going to occupy us now – they left here voluntarily 24 years ago. It’s not the Russians that have ravaged Polish industry since 1989. It’s not the Russians that have stifled Poles with usurious debt. Finally, it’s not the Russians that are responsible for the fact that we have become the easternmost aircraft carrier of the United States anchored in Europe. We ourselves, who failed by allowing such traitors into power, are to blame for this.”
Zmiana, therefore, rejects the current objectification of Poland and is committed to regaining Polish sovereignty and affirming a Polish raison d’etat. This manifests itself on three main fronts.
1. Multipolarity and the geopolitics of peace
Mateusz Piskorski brandishes a Polish flag at the Russian memorial to the Katyn Massacre during a Polish-Russian reconciliation initiative.
[dropcap]P[/dropcap]oland as a state has disappeared from the map more than a handful of times in history, at one time for more than a century. For Zmiana, therefore, it is time to learn history’s lesson: the Polish people must base their security on friendly relations with all countries, especially their more powerful neighbors. Poland cannot afford to base its security on fulfilling the whims of a foreign power, and it cannot afford to pursue an imperial mission which pits it in a war against all. Both such traditions in Polish history have led to catastrophe and are illogical and counterproductive in the changing geopolitical and cultural arrangement of the 21st century.
In the 21st century, Poland’s bet is therefore on multipolarity and peace. This does not mean relinquishing “Polish interests,” however they might be defined (more on this below), but means realizing that Poland offers a unique place on the map and in the heritage of Europe and Eurasia, and should strive to preserve its integrity by playing the role of a constructive partner in mutually beneficial relations. In today’s conditions, according to Zmiana’s foreign policy program, this means that Poland must exit NATO and “engage in the construction of a European Security System from Vladivostok to Lisbon.” Otherwise, Zmiana says, “NATO’s geopolitics turns Poland into the foremost staging point in Eastern Europe aimed against the nuclear power that is the Russian Federation.” By exiting NATO, Poland frees itself from the “guarantee of war” offered by the alliance in North Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and by engaging in a common security project involving both Europe and the burgeoning Eurasian Union, Poland can promote mutually-assured peace from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In order to play a sovereign role in any such project, Zmiana’s program posits that Poland must develop its own military capacity. Intertwined with this is Zmiana’s demand to withdrawal Polish boots from all the places that the US and NATO have dragged them, refuse the purchases and contracts which keep Poland’s armed forces tied to the Pentagon, and ensure that Polish soil will never again be home to CIA torture facilities. Zmiana’s program clearly states the need for “an unconditional ban on the stationing of any foreign armies or military installations on the territory of the Republic.”
A Zmiana poster: “We don’t want American bases and rockets”
Contrary to the commonly held misconception, Zmiana is not unconditionally anti-European Union. Rather, Zmiana believes that the current European Union – characterized by submission to Washington, binding to NATO, neo-liberal economic policies, an interventionist Brussels bureaucracy, etc. – needs to be reformed, as do Poland’s association agreements with this union. In the words of Piskorski from a televised debate that has since disappeared from the internet, Zmiana wants “more Europe in Poland” – not a Washingtonian and Brussels Europe, but a “Europe of Fatherlands” and “Social Europe,” i.e., a “construct intended to provide benefits to all member-states, not the extension to the continent of the interests of a global hegemon from across the ocean and the dictatorship of the European Commission.” Instead, Zmiana stands for genuine European integration, for an independent, unified Europe based on sovereign countries seeking positive, productive relations with other countries and blocs, not confined to rubber-stamping enslaving agreements like the TTIP or CETA.
In Piskorski’s words: “The European Union requires deep reforms and transformation from a neo-liberal club for the rich politically subordinated to Washington into an independent, integrated bloc closely cooperating with the Eurasian Union. Beside this, the EU should return to a European social model which offers every citizen of each of the member states a defined sense of social and economic security.”
Thus, Zmiana’s program affirms: “Considering its geographical location, Poland can be a transit country, a bridge linking East and West, and this assures a favorable attitude towards the development of good, neighborly relations with major and minor entities in the region.”
Only such a Polish foreign policy outlook can work to assure Poland itself and other countries hitherto hindered opportunities and a peaceful and multipolar world order in the conditions of the 21st century. This stands in stark contrast to Poland’s current role as an agent provocateur of Washington. On this basis, Zmiana has firmly replied to all of those detracting it as “pro-Russian” with the argument that Zmiana is pro-Polish and, intimately inseparable from this, pro-peace.
2. Historical justice and rediscovering Polishness
[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ne of the main props of the Polish elite and obstacles standing in the way of an independent Polish consciousness is rampant historical revisionism – so rampant, that in Poland it almost no longer appears to be a “revision,” but the norm. Piskorski has identified this as NATO’s long-term campaign against historical memory. This new norm of Polish historical revisionism is predicated on two main angles, (1) transferring the blame for all of Poland’s historical difficulties onto foreign actors and consequentially (2) identifying disfavored incarnations of the Polish states as “not-Poland” or even an “anti-Poland.”
This anti-historical crusade is waged by a massive network of government and non-government institutions in an attempt to rewrite history to justify Poland’s present foreign and domestic policies. The ultimate aim is presenting Russia as meta-historically, existentially antagonistic towards Polish statehood (Russophobia at its finest) and annulling any criticisms of the Polish elite as anti-Polish and therefore pro-Russian. Freedom of speech and historical debate thus, as indicated in NATO’s new doctrine on combatting “Russian hybrid war” in Eastern Europe, are to be suppressed as inherently “destabilizing.”
Its offices were raided by the Internal Security Agency on May 18, 2016. The agents even confiscated Polish flags.
Click on the bar below to examine the photographic evidence.
Zmiana's offices raided by Poland's Internal Security services. Click here.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he nurturing of mass cognitive dissonance among Poles is astonishing. While monuments to the liberation of Poland by the Soviet Red Army and Polish People’s Army are being systematically, physically dismantled, government campaigns promote the new line that the so-called “Accursed Soldiers” (armed anti-communist gangs during and after the Second World War) are the real liberators, even though there is nothing to show for this. Meanwhile, bestselling “histories” by the infamous Piotr Zychowicz promoted endlessly in bookshops and print media push the thesis that “if only Poles had sided with the Nazis,” then Poles would have “won” the Second World War. The logic here is clear: it is Russia, then incarnated in the USSR, that was/is existentially antagonistic towards Poles, while the Nazis’ designation of Poles as a subhuman race of slave laborers slated for ultimate extermination is merely a detail. What about the suicidal Warsaw Uprising of 1944 that ended in the Nazis’ near total punitive extermination of Warsaw’s population? Well, that’s Stalin’s fault, of course! What about the Polish People’s Republic? It wasn’t socialist Poland, but a “Russian occupation!” What about the tragic Smolensk airplane crash in 2010 that took the lives of much of then Polish officialdom? According to government ministers today, there can be no question that the Russians orchestrated it. What about the massive genocide against Poles at the hands of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators during the Second World War? The Russians organized it, Poland’s “defense” minister claims. No matter the fact that Ukrainian neo-Nazi leader Dmitry Yarosh, whose neo-Nazi paramilitaries were trained, armed, and funded by the Polish government, has openly said: “As for the Poles, we’ll do them a second Katyn massacre.”
The above are merely a handful of the monstrous distortions of Poland’s history that are not only repeatedly drummed into Poles through the education system and the media, but have received official government backing and funding as part of a deliberate campaign. Russophobia, extracted from particular historical conflicts between different incarnations of the Polish and Russian states, is elevated to the level of official ideology – to such an extent that it may very well soon turn out that Poland has had no history, because Russia has taken it all.
Zmiana adamantly opposes this manipulation of history or, as its program frankly calls it, “brainwashing for ad hoc political interests.”
“The first step towards the real sovereignty of the Polish people will be the moment that we stop assuming that our history is first and foremost dependent on external actors, and instead that we are responsible for our choices,” Zmiana’s General Secretary writes.
Jankowski continues: “We will be independent when we stop complaining to the Lord God about evil Russia, despicable Prussia, and treacherous Austria, and when we start seeing the reasons for the partitions in the weaknesses of the then Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Our independence will manifest itself when we stop regrettably remembering the Second Republic and Marshall [Pilsudski] ‘for wanting to do good but the commie maggots and Nazis didn’t allow him,’ and when we accept defeat in the Second World War as the result of the flawed doctrine of ‘two enemies’ adopted, as if from above, by Warsaw. Our thinking will be Polish thinking when the Warsaw Uprising will be seen as a failure not because the Red Army didn’t come to help, but because we ran at tanks with pistols. And finally: Poland will be Polish when we will want to build HER security, and not the ‘Eastern Flank of NATO’ or the ‘Western world’ with the ‘help’ of the Americans.”
Programmatically, the most important point of Zmiana in this regard is mobilizing Polish society’s intellectual capacity to openly debate history and its lessons and applications. Specifically urged in Zmiana’s program is establishing grants and public venues for young and non-establishment scholars, liquidating the infamous propagandistic Institute of National Remembrance, regulating the status of relevant NGO’s, and in their place “convening councils in which historians from our country will work to achieve a common understanding of the difficult stages in the history of relations with our neighbors.”
The fight for historical justice, or justice for history, is Zmiana’s great Gramscian battle. Without independent thinking, there can be no independent Poland.
3. Social justice as the key to sovereignty
[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ut Polish independence, and Poland itself, is impossible without the prosperity of the Polish people. Zmiana, therefore, – let’s call things by their names – is anti-capitalist. Zmiana not only wields its own affiliated trade union, the Zmiana Workers Unity Free Trade Union, which has done more to win gains for Polish workers in the last two years than the mythologized unions that sold out People’s Poland’s wealth over to a handful of oligarchs, but Zmiana also boasts a concrete and ambitious socio-economic program.
Zmiana’s trade union leader speaks on International Workers Day, 2016
Poles must not be the subjects of big foreign capital, Zmiana urges, and the systematic liquidation of the industrial base that the generations of socialist Poland built from scratch on the ruins of the Second World War is depriving Poland of any future and Poles of dignity and livelihood. The post-socialist GDP growth lauded by the media and the regime’s audits, in Zmiana’s opinion, has not gone to benefit Polish workers or towards a sustainable economy. Piskorski explained in an interview: “More than 5,000 enterprises employing more than 1,000 people each were built out of the rubble of war between 1945 and 1989. After 1989, most of them were liquidated and in their place appeared only 500 new ones which violated workers’ rights and were owned by foreign capital.”
Zmiana’s program contains dozens of concrete, immediate policy proposals aimed at improving the livelihood of the majority of working Poles. But the most qualitative intended to empower the Polish working class and guarantee Poland a sustainable, just economy boil down to the following: (1) introducing the category of inalienable collective property into the constitution, (2) establishing a People’s Property Fund to coordinate the nationalizing and putting of strategic economic sectors on a planned basis, (3) withdrawing from the perfidious IMF and World Bank, (4) establishing development plans in coordination with representative workers’ unions, and (5) establishing a Reindustrialization Fund and a state-guaranteed Employment Fund. With these proposals, Zmiana strives to return Poland’s wealth to its people and unhinge the country’s political-economy from the whims of its anti-national, anti-social, and anti-Polish elite whose billions were made by expropriating the economy of former People’s Poland. Only by orienting Poland’s economy on a sustainable and just foundation can other spheres of the country’s life, such as education, healthcare, and environmental protection, be revived. Zmiana’s program stands out from other political parties’ “who are we and what do want” platforms by providing concrete budget estimates for the first five years of a potential Zmiana-led government. This, in Piskorski’s words, is a sine qua non for proving Zmiana’s accountability to Poles and a bold statement that “we are ready to exercise governance in Poland already today” beyond mere populist rhetoric. According to Zmiana’s program, this is a firm rebuff to the “constitutional fraud claiming the ‘realization of the principles of social justice’ and a ‘social market economy’” at the hands of which nearly 40 millions Poles have suffered since 1989.
Zmiana: Work, Peace, Patriotism
In short, Zmiana’s detailed socio-economic program is a testament to its affirmation that only a Poland of, by, and for Poles can resolve the infinitely posed “Polish question.” In a Zmiana Poland, there will be room for parasitic elites and the dictates of foreign capital.
The Piskorski Case as a symptom
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t is no coincidence that Zmiana has been targeted with outright political repression for this revolutionary vision for Poland and Poles and the protests it has led. As Piskorski proudly declared: “We will not complain, because it is obvious that the establishment reacts to us as a virus which could potentially lead to illness and death. We were aware of this from the very beginning…We will certainly not let them forget about us.”
Piskorski is a case and point of this. Two days after he publicly warned that US-NATO troops now have a mandate to suppress Polish dissent on the grounds of combatting “Russian hybrid war,” he was snatched up by armed agents of Poland’s Internal Security Agency while taking his children to school on May 18th, 2016. He was promptly imprisoned in Warsaw, where he remains with no formal charges to this day.
Mateusz Piskorski is a veteran symbol of resistance to Poland’s colonization. A doctor of political science, professor of international relations, and geopolitician who co-founded the European Center for Geopolitical Analysis, Piskorski first rose to prominence as the up and coming youthful parliamentarian of Poland’s Self-Defense Party. Often described as a “populist” party, Self-Defense became the “protest party”, the only major Polish political force opposed to Poland’s NATO membership and adamantly defending Poland’s ruined farmers and defenseless workers. Piskorski rose to become an advisor to the party’s famous anti-establishment leader and his own mentor, Andrzej Lepper. Frighteningly and symptomatically enough, this icon of opposition to Poland’s post-1989 course was found dead in 2011. The official version calls the incident a suicide, but inconvenient theories and unsettling coincidences abound alleging that Lepper’s death was far from his own initiative. In his prison cell today, Piskorski is supposedly writing a book on this scarring incident that claimed the life of one of Poland’s leading critical politicians.
Piskorski’s activism and intellect have made him an icon in more than just Poland. Across the post-Soviet space, he is revered as one of the few sober Polish political voices, and his expertise has been welcomed at nearly a dozen election monitoring missions and countless academic conferences.
Piskorski launched discussions on founding Zmiana in 2014 when, returning from monitoring the referendum on Crimea’s secession from Ukraine and joining the Russian Federation, he was urgently convinced of the need for a new anti-establishment party capable of preventing a Ukrainian disaster scenario from gripping Poland. Piskorski recalls: “I had dozens of meetings and lectures in various regions of the country. We held discussions with very different people and everyone insisted that expert and journalistic activities should come around to politics. In this sense, Zmiana is an entirely grassroots movement.”
However, Piskorski has no intent of claiming the part for himself. “It is not my personal project,” Piskorski told Fort Russ several months before his imprisonment, “but a response to the specific needs of Polish society. I became the party’s face only because of the recognition and controversy which I aroused many years ago as a parliamentarian.” Instead, he says, Zmiana has a greater purpose: “The place of the party on the political scene is currently the role of the anti-system opposition, not only criticizing the current reality (as protest movements do), but also proposing a completely new system in the economic sphere, social policy, ownership structures and international relations.”
For consistently leading Zmiana’s protest movement and personally striving for rapprochement between Poland and its eastern neighbors, Piskorski is now 21st century Poland’s first political prisoner. From prison, he has written compelling letters warning against Poland’s relegation to a WWIII battlefield and urging Poland’s anti-establishment forces of both right and left to unite to save Poland from impending catastrophe.
It is no coincidence that this article is being written in English for Western audiences. As Piskorski told the author in November 2015, Poland’s colonization has led to Western voices of protest being treated with infinitely greater respect and influence. While an open letter to the Polish president signed by European Parliament deputies and demanding Piskorski’s release was shamelessly ignored by both the government and the media, there is still the chance that international attention and pressure can compel Poland’s authorities to resign from their desperate attempts to keep one of Poland’s most concerned citizens, critical scholars, and influential opposition politicians behind bars.
Indeed, as dramatic geopolitical shifts and political revolts continue to grip Europe and the United States, there is the possibility that Poland’s ruling elites will have the rug ripped out from under their feet. For the time being, a man is in jail on no charges and his party is barred from democratic processes. This political repression in itself is a testament to the burning need and importance of (C)hange.
NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS • PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP CLICK HERE
JAFE ARNOLD, Assistant Editor & Correspondent, Eastern EuropeJafe Arnold (J. Arnoldski) is an American expat studying European history and culture at the University of Wroclaw, Poland. Formerly an activist on the American left, he is currently a research fellow and Polish liaison for the Center for Syncretic Studies, a translator and editor at Fort Russ, and the founding editor-in-chief of Eurasianist Internet Archive. Besides translating unique analyses from Russian and Polish for English-language audiences, Arnold’s interests and expertise include geopolitical processes and ideological developments in Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet space.
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[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ut Piskorski has been behind bars for more than nine months, and on February 7th he was sentenced to another three, despite the fact that no official charges, indictment, or evidence have been presented. Zmiana, meanwhile, has to this day still been refused registration as a political party. At the time of this article’s writing, the mass media has launched a new campaign denouncing Zmiana for being “linked to ISIS” on the grounds that one of its leaders is Syrian-born and supports the Palestinian liberation struggle.
What is Zmiana? Who is Mateusz Piskorski? Why are they so feared and repressed by the Polish regime whose ruling party is so hypocritically named Law and Justice? The answers to these two questions are long overdue for Western readers.
In Polish, zmiana means “change.” Zmiana’s first programmatic declaration after its founding in February, 2014 reads: “Change – we all want it! […] Our goal is a change of politics, not a cosmetic surgery, but a deep uprooting of the disgraced structures of the anti-social system. Change means replacing this system with a new order built for the people and by the people. Citizens must once again have control over their destiny and have the final say in public affairs.”
For Zmiana, change means regaining Poland’s sovereignty from the clutches of the US, NATO, and perfidious transnational corporations, and using Polish sovereignty to guarantee dignity, justice, and livelihood to Poles. Only on this basis, Zmiana affirms, can Poland play a peaceful and constructive role in international relations.
“But,” the uninformed but well-intentioned Western reader will ask, “didn’t Poland already regain independence and justice when communism fell?” Zmiana, like nearly half of Poles according to the most extensive surveys, would say “no” or “not exactly.”
Zmiana protests US troops in Poland. Sign reads: “No foreign troops!”
The topic of the People’s Republic of Poland is an entirely unfamiliar one in the West. Perhaps the only “milestone” of the period known to American readers is its overthrow largely contributed to by the “trade union” Solidarity. Of course, the “detail” is omitted that Solidarity was infiltrated and funded to the tune of $10 million by the CIA and itself remains one of the single most scandal-riddled entities in Polish history which subsequently betrayed Polish workers to brutal austerity, privatization, and Western corporations in the blink of an eye. Rather, the history of socialism in Poland is one of a country ruined by war and genocide rebuilt into an industrial power whose wealth was used to guarantee Polish workers socio-economic guarantees unknown to people in the West. The socialist experience in Poland displayed all the gains of 20th century socialism for nation-building and popular welfare. Against all odds, Poland not only re-emerged on the map, but made a comeback as a country in which illiteracy was rapidly eradicated and employment, housing, education, healthcare, leisure, and other socio-economic conditions written off in the West as “privileges” were guaranteed to all Polish citizens by law. In terms that are impossible to understate, within two decades of the Second World War, life expectancy for Poles skyrocketed from 46 in the 1930’s and 25 (!) during the war to 70. Not only was People’s Poland a Poland of reconstruction and attaining new socio-economic and scientific heights, but it was a defining period in which the post-war generations built from scratch a Poland here to stay whose development benefitted not a minority of capitalists, but its working people who played an active role in determining their country’s future and wealth. Despite all of the problems which later plagued Polish socialism, it was a Poland of growth and social justice unparalleled in its history.
After 1989, not only were these socio-economic rights stripped away, but the very foundations that made them viable or in the very least potentially achievable were demolished.
To let Poles speak for themselves on this matter, according to a Pew Research survey, a hefty 43% of citizens over 40 (i.e., those who lived at least two decades in the People’s Republic of Poland) say that Poles are economically worse off now, and a considerable 25% of Poles ages 18-39 say the same. Poles who say life is “about the same” account for another 25%. While this may stand out as less favorable compared to other former socialist bloc countries’ assessments of life under and after socialism, it still speaks volumes, especially in contrast to the ruling elite and the media’s daily slandering of anything and everything in Poland before 1989.
With the collapse of the Polish People’s Republic and Poland’s entry into the Washington-dictated European Union and NATO, Poland did not “regain” sovereignty, much less justice, but forfeited such to the Atlanticist project. Poland was transformed from a country of growth into a country of self-destruction. Every year, college-educated Polish youth emigrate en masse in search of a livelihood only to end up as a cheap labor source for Western corporations. Poland itself, meanwhile, has been de-industrialized, and thus deprived of the capacity to pursue independent and effective social and economic policies which in People’s Poland were guaranteed and, even if not always realized, remained the goal.
On the level of foreign policy, Poland has been encouraged to work against its own interests and security by purposefully aggravating relations with its Eastern neighbors and participating in US wars of aggression. Now, with the deployment of thousands of US-NATO troops, tanks, and missile systems on its soil and the Polish government’s relinquishment of jurisdiction over foreign armed forces on its territory, Poland is de facto under occupation. This occupation is not a mere taxation on Poland’s national budget – it is an undeniable liquidation of sovereignty and inevitably turns the country into a direct target and battlefield in the US’ provocative war on Russia. Mateusz Piskorski admits: “Comparing these two periods, whether we like it or not, it turns out that things are in favor of People’s Poland.” Zmiana’s General Secretary, Tomasz Jankowski, has cogently compared the supposedly “patriotic” Polish regime’s invitation of US-NATO occupation to Duke Konrad Mazowiecki’s invitation of the Teutonic Order to Poland in 1226, a move perpetrated under the pretext of thwarting threats from the East that ended in embroiling Poland in war with its Teutonic “protectors” for two centuries.
In a cogent appeal to uphold Polish sovereignty, Jankowski wrote: “[D]ear compatriots, it’s not the Russians who are going to occupy us now – they left here voluntarily 24 years ago. It’s not the Russians that have ravaged Polish industry since 1989. It’s not the Russians that have stifled Poles with usurious debt. Finally, it’s not the Russians that are responsible for the fact that we have become the easternmost aircraft carrier of the United States anchored in Europe. We ourselves, who failed by allowing such traitors into power, are to blame for this.”
Zmiana, therefore, rejects the current objectification of Poland and is committed to regaining Polish sovereignty and affirming a Polish raison d’etat. This manifests itself on three main fronts.
1. Multipolarity and the geopolitics of peace
Mateusz Piskorski brandishes a Polish flag at the Russian memorial to the Katyn Massacre during a Polish-Russian reconciliation initiative.
[dropcap]P[/dropcap]oland as a state has disappeared from the map more than a handful of times in history, at one time for more than a century. For Zmiana, therefore, it is time to learn history’s lesson: the Polish people must base their security on friendly relations with all countries, especially their more powerful neighbors. Poland cannot afford to base its security on fulfilling the whims of a foreign power, and it cannot afford to pursue an imperial mission which pits it in a war against all. Both such traditions in Polish history have led to catastrophe and are illogical and counterproductive in the changing geopolitical and cultural arrangement of the 21st century.
In the 21st century, Poland’s bet is therefore on multipolarity and peace. This does not mean relinquishing “Polish interests,” however they might be defined (more on this below), but means realizing that Poland offers a unique place on the map and in the heritage of Europe and Eurasia, and should strive to preserve its integrity by playing the role of a constructive partner in mutually beneficial relations. In today’s conditions, according to Zmiana’s foreign policy program, this means that Poland must exit NATO and “engage in the construction of a European Security System from Vladivostok to Lisbon.” Otherwise, Zmiana says, “NATO’s geopolitics turns Poland into the foremost staging point in Eastern Europe aimed against the nuclear power that is the Russian Federation.” By exiting NATO, Poland frees itself from the “guarantee of war” offered by the alliance in North Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and by engaging in a common security project involving both Europe and the burgeoning Eurasian Union, Poland can promote mutually-assured peace from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In order to play a sovereign role in any such project, Zmiana’s program posits that Poland must develop its own military capacity. Intertwined with this is Zmiana’s demand to withdrawal Polish boots from all the places that the US and NATO have dragged them, refuse the purchases and contracts which keep Poland’s armed forces tied to the Pentagon, and ensure that Polish soil will never again be home to CIA torture facilities. Zmiana’s program clearly states the need for “an unconditional ban on the stationing of any foreign armies or military installations on the territory of the Republic.”
A Zmiana poster: “We don’t want American bases and rockets”
Contrary to the commonly held misconception, Zmiana is not unconditionally anti-European Union. Rather, Zmiana believes that the current European Union – characterized by submission to Washington, binding to NATO, neo-liberal economic policies, an interventionist Brussels bureaucracy, etc. – needs to be reformed, as do Poland’s association agreements with this union. In the words of Piskorski from a televised debate that has since disappeared from the internet, Zmiana wants “more Europe in Poland” – not a Washingtonian and Brussels Europe, but a “Europe of Fatherlands” and “Social Europe,” i.e., a “construct intended to provide benefits to all member-states, not the extension to the continent of the interests of a global hegemon from across the ocean and the dictatorship of the European Commission.” Instead, Zmiana stands for genuine European integration, for an independent, unified Europe based on sovereign countries seeking positive, productive relations with other countries and blocs, not confined to rubber-stamping enslaving agreements like the TTIP or CETA.
In Piskorski’s words: “The European Union requires deep reforms and transformation from a neo-liberal club for the rich politically subordinated to Washington into an independent, integrated bloc closely cooperating with the Eurasian Union. Beside this, the EU should return to a European social model which offers every citizen of each of the member states a defined sense of social and economic security.”
Thus, Zmiana’s program affirms: “Considering its geographical location, Poland can be a transit country, a bridge linking East and West, and this assures a favorable attitude towards the development of good, neighborly relations with major and minor entities in the region.”
Only such a Polish foreign policy outlook can work to assure Poland itself and other countries hitherto hindered opportunities and a peaceful and multipolar world order in the conditions of the 21st century. This stands in stark contrast to Poland’s current role as an agent provocateur of Washington. On this basis, Zmiana has firmly replied to all of those detracting it as “pro-Russian” with the argument that Zmiana is pro-Polish and, intimately inseparable from this, pro-peace.
2. Historical justice and rediscovering Polishness
[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ne of the main props of the Polish elite and obstacles standing in the way of an independent Polish consciousness is rampant historical revisionism – so rampant, that in Poland it almost no longer appears to be a “revision,” but the norm. Piskorski has identified this as NATO’s long-term campaign against historical memory. This new norm of Polish historical revisionism is predicated on two main angles, (1) transferring the blame for all of Poland’s historical difficulties onto foreign actors and consequentially (2) identifying disfavored incarnations of the Polish states as “not-Poland” or even an “anti-Poland.”
This anti-historical crusade is waged by a massive network of government and non-government institutions in an attempt to rewrite history to justify Poland’s present foreign and domestic policies. The ultimate aim is presenting Russia as meta-historically, existentially antagonistic towards Polish statehood (Russophobia at its finest) and annulling any criticisms of the Polish elite as anti-Polish and therefore pro-Russian. Freedom of speech and historical debate thus, as indicated in NATO’s new doctrine on combatting “Russian hybrid war” in Eastern Europe, are to be suppressed as inherently “destabilizing.”
Its offices were raided by the Internal Security Agency on May 18, 2016. The agents even confiscated Polish flags.
Click on the bar below to examine the photographic evidence.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he nurturing of mass cognitive dissonance among Poles is astonishing. While monuments to the liberation of Poland by the Soviet Red Army and Polish People’s Army are being systematically, physically dismantled, government campaigns promote the new line that the so-called “Accursed Soldiers” (armed anti-communist gangs during and after the Second World War) are the real liberators, even though there is nothing to show for this. Meanwhile, bestselling “histories” by the infamous Piotr Zychowicz promoted endlessly in bookshops and print media push the thesis that “if only Poles had sided with the Nazis,” then Poles would have “won” the Second World War. The logic here is clear: it is Russia, then incarnated in the USSR, that was/is existentially antagonistic towards Poles, while the Nazis’ designation of Poles as a subhuman race of slave laborers slated for ultimate extermination is merely a detail. What about the suicidal Warsaw Uprising of 1944 that ended in the Nazis’ near total punitive extermination of Warsaw’s population? Well, that’s Stalin’s fault, of course! What about the Polish People’s Republic? It wasn’t socialist Poland, but a “Russian occupation!” What about the tragic Smolensk airplane crash in 2010 that took the lives of much of then Polish officialdom? According to government ministers today, there can be no question that the Russians orchestrated it. What about the massive genocide against Poles at the hands of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators during the Second World War? The Russians organized it, Poland’s “defense” minister claims. No matter the fact that Ukrainian neo-Nazi leader Dmitry Yarosh, whose neo-Nazi paramilitaries were trained, armed, and funded by the Polish government, has openly said: “As for the Poles, we’ll do them a second Katyn massacre.”
The above are merely a handful of the monstrous distortions of Poland’s history that are not only repeatedly drummed into Poles through the education system and the media, but have received official government backing and funding as part of a deliberate campaign. Russophobia, extracted from particular historical conflicts between different incarnations of the Polish and Russian states, is elevated to the level of official ideology – to such an extent that it may very well soon turn out that Poland has had no history, because Russia has taken it all.
Zmiana adamantly opposes this manipulation of history or, as its program frankly calls it, “brainwashing for ad hoc political interests.”
“The first step towards the real sovereignty of the Polish people will be the moment that we stop assuming that our history is first and foremost dependent on external actors, and instead that we are responsible for our choices,” Zmiana’s General Secretary writes.
Jankowski continues: “We will be independent when we stop complaining to the Lord God about evil Russia, despicable Prussia, and treacherous Austria, and when we start seeing the reasons for the partitions in the weaknesses of the then Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Our independence will manifest itself when we stop regrettably remembering the Second Republic and Marshall [Pilsudski] ‘for wanting to do good but the commie maggots and Nazis didn’t allow him,’ and when we accept defeat in the Second World War as the result of the flawed doctrine of ‘two enemies’ adopted, as if from above, by Warsaw. Our thinking will be Polish thinking when the Warsaw Uprising will be seen as a failure not because the Red Army didn’t come to help, but because we ran at tanks with pistols. And finally: Poland will be Polish when we will want to build HER security, and not the ‘Eastern Flank of NATO’ or the ‘Western world’ with the ‘help’ of the Americans.”
Programmatically, the most important point of Zmiana in this regard is mobilizing Polish society’s intellectual capacity to openly debate history and its lessons and applications. Specifically urged in Zmiana’s program is establishing grants and public venues for young and non-establishment scholars, liquidating the infamous propagandistic Institute of National Remembrance, regulating the status of relevant NGO’s, and in their place “convening councils in which historians from our country will work to achieve a common understanding of the difficult stages in the history of relations with our neighbors.”
The fight for historical justice, or justice for history, is Zmiana’s great Gramscian battle. Without independent thinking, there can be no independent Poland.
3. Social justice as the key to sovereignty
[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ut Polish independence, and Poland itself, is impossible without the prosperity of the Polish people. Zmiana, therefore, – let’s call things by their names – is anti-capitalist. Zmiana not only wields its own affiliated trade union, the Zmiana Workers Unity Free Trade Union, which has done more to win gains for Polish workers in the last two years than the mythologized unions that sold out People’s Poland’s wealth over to a handful of oligarchs, but Zmiana also boasts a concrete and ambitious socio-economic program.
Zmiana’s trade union leader speaks on International Workers Day, 2016
Poles must not be the subjects of big foreign capital, Zmiana urges, and the systematic liquidation of the industrial base that the generations of socialist Poland built from scratch on the ruins of the Second World War is depriving Poland of any future and Poles of dignity and livelihood. The post-socialist GDP growth lauded by the media and the regime’s audits, in Zmiana’s opinion, has not gone to benefit Polish workers or towards a sustainable economy. Piskorski explained in an interview: “More than 5,000 enterprises employing more than 1,000 people each were built out of the rubble of war between 1945 and 1989. After 1989, most of them were liquidated and in their place appeared only 500 new ones which violated workers’ rights and were owned by foreign capital.”
Zmiana’s program contains dozens of concrete, immediate policy proposals aimed at improving the livelihood of the majority of working Poles. But the most qualitative intended to empower the Polish working class and guarantee Poland a sustainable, just economy boil down to the following: (1) introducing the category of inalienable collective property into the constitution, (2) establishing a People’s Property Fund to coordinate the nationalizing and putting of strategic economic sectors on a planned basis, (3) withdrawing from the perfidious IMF and World Bank, (4) establishing development plans in coordination with representative workers’ unions, and (5) establishing a Reindustrialization Fund and a state-guaranteed Employment Fund. With these proposals, Zmiana strives to return Poland’s wealth to its people and unhinge the country’s political-economy from the whims of its anti-national, anti-social, and anti-Polish elite whose billions were made by expropriating the economy of former People’s Poland. Only by orienting Poland’s economy on a sustainable and just foundation can other spheres of the country’s life, such as education, healthcare, and environmental protection, be revived. Zmiana’s program stands out from other political parties’ “who are we and what do want” platforms by providing concrete budget estimates for the first five years of a potential Zmiana-led government. This, in Piskorski’s words, is a sine qua non for proving Zmiana’s accountability to Poles and a bold statement that “we are ready to exercise governance in Poland already today” beyond mere populist rhetoric. According to Zmiana’s program, this is a firm rebuff to the “constitutional fraud claiming the ‘realization of the principles of social justice’ and a ‘social market economy’” at the hands of which nearly 40 millions Poles have suffered since 1989.
Zmiana: Work, Peace, Patriotism
In short, Zmiana’s detailed socio-economic program is a testament to its affirmation that only a Poland of, by, and for Poles can resolve the infinitely posed “Polish question.” In a Zmiana Poland, there will be room for parasitic elites and the dictates of foreign capital.
The Piskorski Case as a symptom
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t is no coincidence that Zmiana has been targeted with outright political repression for this revolutionary vision for Poland and Poles and the protests it has led. As Piskorski proudly declared: “We will not complain, because it is obvious that the establishment reacts to us as a virus which could potentially lead to illness and death. We were aware of this from the very beginning…We will certainly not let them forget about us.”
Piskorski is a case and point of this. Two days after he publicly warned that US-NATO troops now have a mandate to suppress Polish dissent on the grounds of combatting “Russian hybrid war,” he was snatched up by armed agents of Poland’s Internal Security Agency while taking his children to school on May 18th, 2016. He was promptly imprisoned in Warsaw, where he remains with no formal charges to this day.
Mateusz Piskorski is a veteran symbol of resistance to Poland’s colonization. A doctor of political science, professor of international relations, and geopolitician who co-founded the European Center for Geopolitical Analysis, Piskorski first rose to prominence as the up and coming youthful parliamentarian of Poland’s Self-Defense Party. Often described as a “populist” party, Self-Defense became the “protest party”, the only major Polish political force opposed to Poland’s NATO membership and adamantly defending Poland’s ruined farmers and defenseless workers. Piskorski rose to become an advisor to the party’s famous anti-establishment leader and his own mentor, Andrzej Lepper. Frighteningly and symptomatically enough, this icon of opposition to Poland’s post-1989 course was found dead in 2011. The official version calls the incident a suicide, but inconvenient theories and unsettling coincidences abound alleging that Lepper’s death was far from his own initiative. In his prison cell today, Piskorski is supposedly writing a book on this scarring incident that claimed the life of one of Poland’s leading critical politicians.
Piskorski’s activism and intellect have made him an icon in more than just Poland. Across the post-Soviet space, he is revered as one of the few sober Polish political voices, and his expertise has been welcomed at nearly a dozen election monitoring missions and countless academic conferences.
Piskorski launched discussions on founding Zmiana in 2014 when, returning from monitoring the referendum on Crimea’s secession from Ukraine and joining the Russian Federation, he was urgently convinced of the need for a new anti-establishment party capable of preventing a Ukrainian disaster scenario from gripping Poland. Piskorski recalls: “I had dozens of meetings and lectures in various regions of the country. We held discussions with very different people and everyone insisted that expert and journalistic activities should come around to politics. In this sense, Zmiana is an entirely grassroots movement.”
However, Piskorski has no intent of claiming the part for himself. “It is not my personal project,” Piskorski told Fort Russ several months before his imprisonment, “but a response to the specific needs of Polish society. I became the party’s face only because of the recognition and controversy which I aroused many years ago as a parliamentarian.” Instead, he says, Zmiana has a greater purpose: “The place of the party on the political scene is currently the role of the anti-system opposition, not only criticizing the current reality (as protest movements do), but also proposing a completely new system in the economic sphere, social policy, ownership structures and international relations.”
For consistently leading Zmiana’s protest movement and personally striving for rapprochement between Poland and its eastern neighbors, Piskorski is now 21st century Poland’s first political prisoner. From prison, he has written compelling letters warning against Poland’s relegation to a WWIII battlefield and urging Poland’s anti-establishment forces of both right and left to unite to save Poland from impending catastrophe.
It is no coincidence that this article is being written in English for Western audiences. As Piskorski told the author in November 2015, Poland’s colonization has led to Western voices of protest being treated with infinitely greater respect and influence. While an open letter to the Polish president signed by European Parliament deputies and demanding Piskorski’s release was shamelessly ignored by both the government and the media, there is still the chance that international attention and pressure can compel Poland’s authorities to resign from their desperate attempts to keep one of Poland’s most concerned citizens, critical scholars, and influential opposition politicians behind bars.
Indeed, as dramatic geopolitical shifts and political revolts continue to grip Europe and the United States, there is the possibility that Poland’s ruling elites will have the rug ripped out from under their feet. For the time being, a man is in jail on no charges and his party is barred from democratic processes. This political repression in itself is a testament to the burning need and importance of (C)hange.
JAFE ARNOLD, Assistant Editor & Correspondent, Eastern EuropeJafe Arnold (J. Arnoldski) is an American expat studying European history and culture at the University of Wroclaw, Poland. Formerly an activist on the American left, he is currently a research fellow and Polish liaison for the Center for Syncretic Studies, a translator and editor at Fort Russ, and the founding editor-in-chief of Eurasianist Internet Archive. Besides translating unique analyses from Russian and Polish for English-language audiences, Arnold’s interests and expertise include geopolitical processes and ideological developments in Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet space. Note to Commenters
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Welcome to Trumpland: Obama’s Legacy
Luciana Bohne
COUNTERPUNCH
A
A clutch of customary villains, no less villainous than the ones before. His boss of Labor opposes raising the minimum wage. His boss of Treasury is a former partner of Goldman Sachs, international economic polluters, big time.
In January 2017, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved up its “Doomsday Clock” by thirty seconds to two-and-a-half minutes to midnight, the closest to Armageddon since 1953. The causes, they wrote, were “nuclear volatility” and climate change. The signs that Trump might reverse the course of doom are unpromising. Rex Tillerson’s appointment means that Exxon-Mobil will function as the virtual Secretary of State. The war state rules: “Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all,” Trump said to Mika Brzesinki in a phone call in December, if we can trust the report by the co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
Meanwhile, during and after the electoral process, the circulatory apparatus of two-gang democracy has shown terminal symptoms of arteriosclerosis. As latent system-dementia becomes overt, the polity has been losing its marbles, too. Two and a half million participated in the Women’s March the day after the inauguration, protesting Trump’s threat to women’s rights—a mass never seen in the streets before to oppose Obama’s killings, which included a disproportionate amount of civilians, many of them women. You know the numbers: 50,000 in Libya; 10,000 in Yemen and Ukraine each; 400,000 in Syria; 2,500 in Gaza, to select the most widely known figures. Add to these casualties the millions of internally displaced and refugees (65 millions in 2017, up from 59 million in 2016), fleeing wars and economic depredation by the knights of Obama’s neo-liberal and neo-colonial ministration.
But we mustn’t begrudge late risers.
Behind the old gang lies a regime of mendacity, a tide of greed, a blight of inequality, a plague of wars, a reign of hypocrisy. Before the new gang, a vision of Pandora, opening wider her nasty box of troubles. More evils released to join the ones already loosed. The streets are turned into a bedlam of discord, bathos, alarm, and confusion because the forgetful harpy and serial killer Hillary Clinton lost and the crazed buffoon and gaseous “orange” zeppelin won—billionaire Trump, head of an empire of 111 industrial, commercial, and financial corporations. “Friend of the people.”
I’m not making this up.
The result of the election has been a political cluster bomb. Bomblets continue to explode in the form of protests and marches and media hysteria. None of these focus on what really matters: the future of humanity on an overheated planet, menaced by America’s systematic drive for space and power over the Earth.
It’s the geopolitics, stupid.
Popular pandemonium exploded over the merits and demerits of two evils. How can a polity be brought so low? The two evils are one. In the poisonous air, I hear the echo of Mark Twain’s sardonic rewrite of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” to denounce his own time’s descent into the moral quagmire of imperialism in the Spanish-American War of 1898:
Mine eyes have seen the orgy of the launching of the sword
He is searching out the hoardings where the strangers’ wealth is stored
He has loosed his fateful lightning, and with woe and death has scored
His lust is marching on.
It would be a relief to hear a country united in such a challenging chorus accusing officials’ and backers’ domestic and foreign violence. But the night is not yet dark enough for the owl of Minerva to begin her flight and reveal the gangs’ collective abuses of our trust in their vainglorious myths. We are stranded on the “darkling plane,” in a greyness which the powers that deny us understanding are painting with still more grey. We cannot read the past, so we cannot move into the future. We sense what we think we know is not what is. We are not even sure we are living in the present.
How can such a suspension of time not make one nauseous?
“The Nausea is not within me . . . I feel it out there . . . I am within it.” Just so Racontin, the protagonist of Jean Paul Sartre’s novel, Nausea,explains the physical revulsion he felt on touching reality around him—a chair, a person, a work of art. But where is the rot? “I feel it out there in the wall, in the suspenders, everywhere around me.” What does it look like? “A monster? A giant carapace? Sunk in the mud? A dozen pairs of claws or fins laboring slowly in the slime? The monster rises. At the bottom of the water.”
Two and a half million participated in the Women’s March the day after the inauguration, protesting Trump’s threat to women’s rights—a mass never seen in the streets before to oppose Obama’s killings, which included a disproportionate amount of civilians, many of them women.
Is “Trump” Grendl’s new name? In the shock of the weeks before the inauguration, the old gang’s media minstrels indeed decried that a monster had been loosed from the slime of the White Lagoon peopled by racists voting in the rustic hinterlands—the Rustofarians. The minstrels spread urban panic. The crowds roared: bugger the elections; have a vote recount; abolish the Electoral College; declare the Trump unfit. This monster, about to squat in an oval-shaped room, like so many elect before him, was supposed to have been Hillary Clinton.
But she morphed into him.
[dropcap]H[/dropcap]er gang pointed the finger at Russia. It was Russia that brought this ill wind, not the foulness of the Clinton clan, not the bloodlust of the Obama years, not the political slaughter of the lymphatic social democrat, Bernie Sanders, who could have saved the gang’s ass. Given it four more years of failing but respectable life. It was Russia that wove the web of fate—Russia “not born of woman,” unnatural, evil, stained with the original sin of communism, the mark of Cain. Russia that brought “great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill” and cut down the Lady Queen of Chaos in the prime of her ascendancy to Empress of a world, large swathes of which she had drained of blood and was herself “in blood stepped so far, that should [she] wade no more, returning were as tedious as go over”
But she was left there, in blood’s midstream, and they rued.
The newest “ami du people” in his gilded digs. All is well in this Panglossian world.
The entire gang world—the Heimat of the globalist “international community”—went into a chorus of shrieking laments. The political eunuchs in Europe cried along with their American masters. Here was the upstart presidential mirror in which the Heimat of the good and the great could no longer admire itself enlarged, greater, finer, more humanitarian than his crude illiberal vulgarity would now reflect back. The old gang’s bad-faith had become unsustainable. Their self-image, propped up by deceptive ideological claptrap—“liberal values”—was shattered. What of the solemnity of slogans—“civil society,” rule of law, dedication to universal principles, respect for identities, protection of ethnic minorities, zeal for religious freedoms? What of the pompous phrases, the lubrications of exalted promises? All gone into the vortex of the philistine stupidity of the deplorable masses and their despotic ballot box. Nothing to hear but the howling of an evil new wind.
The hearing of which was new to them.
Before Trump emerged from the electoral swamp the winner, everything already had been the contrary of everything. And became more so. The liberation of 100,000 civilians in Aleppo in December 2016 by the Syrian Arab Army and the Russian allies from four years of Western-backed terror, they called “a war crime.” The separation of Crimeans from Ukraine by popular referendum (over 90% in favor) joining Russia, they called “Russian aggression.” The US/EU coup in Ukraine (2013-14), planned and executed by the Obama Neo-con State Department and costing $5 billion dollars, substituting an elected government by a junta of Neo-Nazi ministers and officials, they called the return of “democracy to Ukraine.” The fascism, now attributed to Trump as a novelty, was hiding in plain sight in Obama’s reign of illegal wars, regime changes, ubiquitous sanctions, and terror proxy armies, studiously ignored or fictionalized by the scribbler-courtiers in the media, the punditry, think-tanks, foundations, and officialdom.
These “fixers” reversed cause and effect. They obscured the fact that Crimea’s separation from Ukraine was the effect of the US-coup in Kiev. They used it as the cause for tightening NATO’s military noose around Russia, including with offensive missiles, called “defensive.” Thus the effect of American regime-change in Ukraine became the cause of American militarization of Central and Eastern Europe. With objective Russia. This militarization against the constructed phantom of Russian aggression goes by the grand name of Atlantic Resolve 2017, which the US Department of Defense justifies on its website in these terms:
The United States is demonstrating its continued commitment to collective security through a series of actions designed to reassure NATO allies and partners of America’s dedication to enduring peace and stability in the region in light of the Russian intervention in Ukraine (emphasis mine).
That bullhorn of the military-industrial complex, John McCain, turned reality upside down in an instruction to the new gang for continuing the sanction regime against Russia:
“In just the last three years under Vladimir Putin, Russia has invaded Ukraine, annexed Crimea, threatened NATO allies, and intervened militarily in Syria, leaving a trail of death, destruction, and broken promises in his wake.”
In a rational world, the bulk of this accusation would be lobbed at the planners in Obama’s neo-liberal-neo-con gang, but no imperial ego can admit being morally in the wrong. It dresses its violence in cloth of gold, spun obligingly by the official media. The bloody rags of responsibility are tossed onto someone else, who must be demonized, preferably by a media liberal. Rachel Maddow, for example, graduated as an instant Sovietologist in her incendiary rant linking Putin’s capitalist Russia to Stalin’s socialist USSR. Tell me what rallies the American public—including and especially the liberals–to the side of the Star and Stripes more precipitously than raising the communist ghost?
The manipulation of news and the distortion of reality are the most powerful weapons in the hands of power. They can make a whole reality disappear. Yemen’s, for example. The Saudi “coalition,” backed by the US and Britain, began bombing Yemen on 23 March 2015. Since then, 3.2 million Yemenis have been displaced, half the people suffer from malnutrition, 10,000 civilians have been killed (that’s 13 civilians per day), 2 million youngsters cannot attend school, nearly 15 million people (55 percent children) have no access to basic medical care.
Yet, we heard nothing of this immense suffering. The US and Britain, in fact, profited from the war in Yemen. The Obama administration sold on the world’s weapon market $200 billion worth of arms, the largest US weapons’ sale since WW II–over $100 billion to Saudi Arabia alone. Britain’s contribution to Saudi Arabia’s arsenal was $3.2 billion in the last year alone. The United States and Britain continue to provide intelligence and logistical support to the Saudi-led coalition, which intervened on the side of Yemeni President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who fled to Saudi Arabia in the midst of his people’s civil war.
But, throughout the Obama years, all was quiet on the Yemeni front in officialdom and its media mouthpiece over the deliberate targeting of vital civilian infrastructure, schools and hospitals, weddings and funerals. At a funeral in Sana, last October, a Saudi airstrike killed 114 civilians. Before the bombing of Yemen began, the Obama gang imposed sanctions and blockaded Yemen—all without a Security Council resolution or any pretense of adhering to international law. The director of Yemen’s Save the Children recently remarked:
“Even before the war tens of thousands of Yemeni children were dying of preventable causes. But now, the situation is much worse and an estimated 1,000 children are dying every week from preventable killers like diarrhea, malnutrition and respiratory tract infections.”
In foreign policy, this “racist” is no different from the “post-racist.” Trump’s “defense” planners are putting Yemen on the media map but only to use it as a cudgel to beat Iran with. On Yemen, they are reported as setting to step up Obama’s infamous drone “kill list,” ramping up the US role in the civil war, and looking to engage more directly. Taking Yemen as an example, it becomes clear that both the liberal and the illiberal president regard the business of war a national industry. Obama’s last words in office exalted the assumed invincibility of America’s military prowess. On Dec 22, Trump posted on Twitter, “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”
There will be no retrenchment of US belligerence under Trump. In the first aftermath of his inauguration, President Trump directed Defense Secretary James Mattis to
“Initiate a new Nuclear Posture Review to ensure that the United States’ nuclear deterrent is modern, robust, flexible, resilient, ready, and appropriately tailored to deter 21st-century threats and reassure our allies.”
On his first visit to the Pentagon, the president signed an executive action calling for expansion of the US military, including its nuclear arsenal to be ready for war with its “near competitors,” understood as Russia and China. “I am signing an executive action to begin a great rebuilding of the armed services of the United States,” he told the Pentagon during the signing.
Thus was the military-industrial complex pacified for losing their favorite candidate, Hillary Clinton. Reported by the New York Times,
the Pentagon itself, anticipating Trump’s directive to Mattis and his executive action, had been preparing “classified options” to expand the use of Special Operations forces, raising the troop level in Iraq and Syria, and expecting the White House to delegate more authority to the Pentagon and field commanders. The “classified options” included arming the Syrian Kurds for the expected battle for Raqqa, in an obvious scheme to drive a wedge between Turkey and Russia in their belated rapprochement over “regime change” in Syria.
There are indications that, contrary to Trump’s stated aversion to “regime change,” Iran will become the new Syria. In the wake of Iran’s test of a medium-range ballistic missile on January 30, National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, has begun a campaign of verbal belligerence, disinformation, and outright lies against Iran. In a statement Flynn said that
“The recent ballistic missile launch is . . . in defiance of UN Security Council Resolution 2231, which calls upon Iran not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using such ballistic missile technology.”
This is a gross distortion of the truth. UN Security Council Resolution 2231 bans Iran from developing missiles capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, but the resolution states no provision preventing Iran from developing defensive capability. The missile tested on January 30 had no capacity for carrying a nuclear warhead; Iran has not violated Resolution 2231.
Flynn’s misrepresentation of Iran’s missile test hums the tune of the fake threat concocted by the Bush neo-cons on the run-up to the fatal invasion of Iraq in 2003 that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. That lie cost Iraq one million dead, the drawing and quartering of Iraq’s political integrity, internal and external refugees by the millions. Ominously, Flynn ends his statement with a threat, “As of today, we are officially putting Iran on notice.” On cue, came the sanctions targeting 25 individuals and businesses connected to Iran’s missile program, including Chinese persons and companies.
In conclusion, I fail to see the reasons for the gang warfare in DC. Long-standing objectives appear to be shared: the global dominance of the United States by economic and military means. What seems to be the bone of contention is the method of dominating American public opinion. The war is over rhetoric: liberal versus populist “values.” Thus they are fighting over control of the public’s mind. It should not be surrendered to either persuasion. Perhaps the only silver lining in the Trump ascension is the potential empowerment and resurgence of popular resistance.
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Luciana Bohne is co-founder of Film Criticism, a journal of cinema studies, and teaches at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania.
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A clutch of customary villains, no less villainous than the ones before. His boss of Labor opposes raising the minimum wage. His boss of Treasury is a former partner of Goldman Sachs, international economic polluters, big time.
In January 2017, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved up its “Doomsday Clock” by thirty seconds to two-and-a-half minutes to midnight, the closest to Armageddon since 1953. The causes, they wrote, were “nuclear volatility” and climate change. The signs that Trump might reverse the course of doom are unpromising. Rex Tillerson’s appointment means that Exxon-Mobil will function as the virtual Secretary of State. The war state rules: “Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all,” Trump said to Mika Brzesinki in a phone call in December, if we can trust the report by the co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
Meanwhile, during and after the electoral process, the circulatory apparatus of two-gang democracy has shown terminal symptoms of arteriosclerosis. As latent system-dementia becomes overt, the polity has been losing its marbles, too. Two and a half million participated in the Women’s March the day after the inauguration, protesting Trump’s threat to women’s rights—a mass never seen in the streets before to oppose Obama’s killings, which included a disproportionate amount of civilians, many of them women. You know the numbers: 50,000 in Libya; 10,000 in Yemen and Ukraine each; 400,000 in Syria; 2,500 in Gaza, to select the most widely known figures. Add to these casualties the millions of internally displaced and refugees (65 millions in 2017, up from 59 million in 2016), fleeing wars and economic depredation by the knights of Obama’s neo-liberal and neo-colonial ministration.
But we mustn’t begrudge late risers.
Behind the old gang lies a regime of mendacity, a tide of greed, a blight of inequality, a plague of wars, a reign of hypocrisy. Before the new gang, a vision of Pandora, opening wider her nasty box of troubles. More evils released to join the ones already loosed. The streets are turned into a bedlam of discord, bathos, alarm, and confusion because the forgetful harpy and serial killer Hillary Clinton lost and the crazed buffoon and gaseous “orange” zeppelin won—billionaire Trump, head of an empire of 111 industrial, commercial, and financial corporations. “Friend of the people.”
I’m not making this up.
The result of the election has been a political cluster bomb. Bomblets continue to explode in the form of protests and marches and media hysteria. None of these focus on what really matters: the future of humanity on an overheated planet, menaced by America’s systematic drive for space and power over the Earth.
It’s the geopolitics, stupid.
Popular pandemonium exploded over the merits and demerits of two evils. How can a polity be brought so low? The two evils are one. In the poisonous air, I hear the echo of Mark Twain’s sardonic rewrite of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” to denounce his own time’s descent into the moral quagmire of imperialism in the Spanish-American War of 1898:
Mine eyes have seen the orgy of the launching of the sword
He is searching out the hoardings where the strangers’ wealth is stored
He has loosed his fateful lightning, and with woe and death has scored
His lust is marching on.
It would be a relief to hear a country united in such a challenging chorus accusing officials’ and backers’ domestic and foreign violence. But the night is not yet dark enough for the owl of Minerva to begin her flight and reveal the gangs’ collective abuses of our trust in their vainglorious myths. We are stranded on the “darkling plane,” in a greyness which the powers that deny us understanding are painting with still more grey. We cannot read the past, so we cannot move into the future. We sense what we think we know is not what is. We are not even sure we are living in the present.
How can such a suspension of time not make one nauseous?
“The Nausea is not within me . . . I feel it out there . . . I am within it.” Just so Racontin, the protagonist of Jean Paul Sartre’s novel, Nausea,explains the physical revulsion he felt on touching reality around him—a chair, a person, a work of art. But where is the rot? “I feel it out there in the wall, in the suspenders, everywhere around me.” What does it look like? “A monster? A giant carapace? Sunk in the mud? A dozen pairs of claws or fins laboring slowly in the slime? The monster rises. At the bottom of the water.”
Two and a half million participated in the Women’s March the day after the inauguration, protesting Trump’s threat to women’s rights—a mass never seen in the streets before to oppose Obama’s killings, which included a disproportionate amount of civilians, many of them women.
Is “Trump” Grendl’s new name? In the shock of the weeks before the inauguration, the old gang’s media minstrels indeed decried that a monster had been loosed from the slime of the White Lagoon peopled by racists voting in the rustic hinterlands—the Rustofarians. The minstrels spread urban panic. The crowds roared: bugger the elections; have a vote recount; abolish the Electoral College; declare the Trump unfit. This monster, about to squat in an oval-shaped room, like so many elect before him, was supposed to have been Hillary Clinton.
But she morphed into him.
[dropcap]H[/dropcap]er gang pointed the finger at Russia. It was Russia that brought this ill wind, not the foulness of the Clinton clan, not the bloodlust of the Obama years, not the political slaughter of the lymphatic social democrat, Bernie Sanders, who could have saved the gang’s ass. Given it four more years of failing but respectable life. It was Russia that wove the web of fate—Russia “not born of woman,” unnatural, evil, stained with the original sin of communism, the mark of Cain. Russia that brought “great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill” and cut down the Lady Queen of Chaos in the prime of her ascendancy to Empress of a world, large swathes of which she had drained of blood and was herself “in blood stepped so far, that should [she] wade no more, returning were as tedious as go over”
But she was left there, in blood’s midstream, and they rued.
The newest “ami du people” in his gilded digs. All is well in this Panglossian world.
The entire gang world—the Heimat of the globalist “international community”—went into a chorus of shrieking laments. The political eunuchs in Europe cried along with their American masters. Here was the upstart presidential mirror in which the Heimat of the good and the great could no longer admire itself enlarged, greater, finer, more humanitarian than his crude illiberal vulgarity would now reflect back. The old gang’s bad-faith had become unsustainable. Their self-image, propped up by deceptive ideological claptrap—“liberal values”—was shattered. What of the solemnity of slogans—“civil society,” rule of law, dedication to universal principles, respect for identities, protection of ethnic minorities, zeal for religious freedoms? What of the pompous phrases, the lubrications of exalted promises? All gone into the vortex of the philistine stupidity of the deplorable masses and their despotic ballot box. Nothing to hear but the howling of an evil new wind.
The hearing of which was new to them.
Before Trump emerged from the electoral swamp the winner, everything already had been the contrary of everything. And became more so. The liberation of 100,000 civilians in Aleppo in December 2016 by the Syrian Arab Army and the Russian allies from four years of Western-backed terror, they called “a war crime.” The separation of Crimeans from Ukraine by popular referendum (over 90% in favor) joining Russia, they called “Russian aggression.” The US/EU coup in Ukraine (2013-14), planned and executed by the Obama Neo-con State Department and costing $5 billion dollars, substituting an elected government by a junta of Neo-Nazi ministers and officials, they called the return of “democracy to Ukraine.” The fascism, now attributed to Trump as a novelty, was hiding in plain sight in Obama’s reign of illegal wars, regime changes, ubiquitous sanctions, and terror proxy armies, studiously ignored or fictionalized by the scribbler-courtiers in the media, the punditry, think-tanks, foundations, and officialdom.
These “fixers” reversed cause and effect. They obscured the fact that Crimea’s separation from Ukraine was the effect of the US-coup in Kiev. They used it as the cause for tightening NATO’s military noose around Russia, including with offensive missiles, called “defensive.” Thus the effect of American regime-change in Ukraine became the cause of American militarization of Central and Eastern Europe. With objective Russia. This militarization against the constructed phantom of Russian aggression goes by the grand name of Atlantic Resolve 2017, which the US Department of Defense justifies on its website in these terms:
The United States is demonstrating its continued commitment to collective security through a series of actions designed to reassure NATO allies and partners of America’s dedication to enduring peace and stability in the region in light of the Russian intervention in Ukraine (emphasis mine).
That bullhorn of the military-industrial complex, John McCain, turned reality upside down in an instruction to the new gang for continuing the sanction regime against Russia:
“In just the last three years under Vladimir Putin, Russia has invaded Ukraine, annexed Crimea, threatened NATO allies, and intervened militarily in Syria, leaving a trail of death, destruction, and broken promises in his wake.”
In a rational world, the bulk of this accusation would be lobbed at the planners in Obama’s neo-liberal-neo-con gang, but no imperial ego can admit being morally in the wrong. It dresses its violence in cloth of gold, spun obligingly by the official media. The bloody rags of responsibility are tossed onto someone else, who must be demonized, preferably by a media liberal. Rachel Maddow, for example, graduated as an instant Sovietologist in her incendiary rant linking Putin’s capitalist Russia to Stalin’s socialist USSR. Tell me what rallies the American public—including and especially the liberals–to the side of the Star and Stripes more precipitously than raising the communist ghost?
The manipulation of news and the distortion of reality are the most powerful weapons in the hands of power. They can make a whole reality disappear. Yemen’s, for example. The Saudi “coalition,” backed by the US and Britain, began bombing Yemen on 23 March 2015. Since then, 3.2 million Yemenis have been displaced, half the people suffer from malnutrition, 10,000 civilians have been killed (that’s 13 civilians per day), 2 million youngsters cannot attend school, nearly 15 million people (55 percent children) have no access to basic medical care.
Yet, we heard nothing of this immense suffering. The US and Britain, in fact, profited from the war in Yemen. The Obama administration sold on the world’s weapon market $200 billion worth of arms, the largest US weapons’ sale since WW II–over $100 billion to Saudi Arabia alone. Britain’s contribution to Saudi Arabia’s arsenal was $3.2 billion in the last year alone. The United States and Britain continue to provide intelligence and logistical support to the Saudi-led coalition, which intervened on the side of Yemeni President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who fled to Saudi Arabia in the midst of his people’s civil war.
But, throughout the Obama years, all was quiet on the Yemeni front in officialdom and its media mouthpiece over the deliberate targeting of vital civilian infrastructure, schools and hospitals, weddings and funerals. At a funeral in Sana, last October, a Saudi airstrike killed 114 civilians. Before the bombing of Yemen began, the Obama gang imposed sanctions and blockaded Yemen—all without a Security Council resolution or any pretense of adhering to international law. The director of Yemen’s Save the Children recently remarked:
“Even before the war tens of thousands of Yemeni children were dying of preventable causes. But now, the situation is much worse and an estimated 1,000 children are dying every week from preventable killers like diarrhea, malnutrition and respiratory tract infections.”
In foreign policy, this “racist” is no different from the “post-racist.” Trump’s “defense” planners are putting Yemen on the media map but only to use it as a cudgel to beat Iran with. On Yemen, they are reported as setting to step up Obama’s infamous drone “kill list,” ramping up the US role in the civil war, and looking to engage more directly. Taking Yemen as an example, it becomes clear that both the liberal and the illiberal president regard the business of war a national industry. Obama’s last words in office exalted the assumed invincibility of America’s military prowess. On Dec 22, Trump posted on Twitter, “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”
There will be no retrenchment of US belligerence under Trump. In the first aftermath of his inauguration, President Trump directed Defense Secretary James Mattis to
“Initiate a new Nuclear Posture Review to ensure that the United States’ nuclear deterrent is modern, robust, flexible, resilient, ready, and appropriately tailored to deter 21st-century threats and reassure our allies.”
On his first visit to the Pentagon, the president signed an executive action calling for expansion of the US military, including its nuclear arsenal to be ready for war with its “near competitors,” understood as Russia and China. “I am signing an executive action to begin a great rebuilding of the armed services of the United States,” he told the Pentagon during the signing.
Thus was the military-industrial complex pacified for losing their favorite candidate, Hillary Clinton. Reported by the New York Times,
the Pentagon itself, anticipating Trump’s directive to Mattis and his executive action, had been preparing “classified options” to expand the use of Special Operations forces, raising the troop level in Iraq and Syria, and expecting the White House to delegate more authority to the Pentagon and field commanders. The “classified options” included arming the Syrian Kurds for the expected battle for Raqqa, in an obvious scheme to drive a wedge between Turkey and Russia in their belated rapprochement over “regime change” in Syria.
There are indications that, contrary to Trump’s stated aversion to “regime change,” Iran will become the new Syria. In the wake of Iran’s test of a medium-range ballistic missile on January 30, National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, has begun a campaign of verbal belligerence, disinformation, and outright lies against Iran. In a statement Flynn said that
“The recent ballistic missile launch is . . . in defiance of UN Security Council Resolution 2231, which calls upon Iran not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using such ballistic missile technology.”
This is a gross distortion of the truth. UN Security Council Resolution 2231 bans Iran from developing missiles capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, but the resolution states no provision preventing Iran from developing defensive capability. The missile tested on January 30 had no capacity for carrying a nuclear warhead; Iran has not violated Resolution 2231.
Flynn’s misrepresentation of Iran’s missile test hums the tune of the fake threat concocted by the Bush neo-cons on the run-up to the fatal invasion of Iraq in 2003 that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. That lie cost Iraq one million dead, the drawing and quartering of Iraq’s political integrity, internal and external refugees by the millions. Ominously, Flynn ends his statement with a threat, “As of today, we are officially putting Iran on notice.” On cue, came the sanctions targeting 25 individuals and businesses connected to Iran’s missile program, including Chinese persons and companies.
In conclusion, I fail to see the reasons for the gang warfare in DC. Long-standing objectives appear to be shared: the global dominance of the United States by economic and military means. What seems to be the bone of contention is the method of dominating American public opinion. The war is over rhetoric: liberal versus populist “values.” Thus they are fighting over control of the public’s mind. It should not be surrendered to either persuasion. Perhaps the only silver lining in the Trump ascension is the potential empowerment and resurgence of popular resistance.
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com
We apologize for this inconvenience.
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The Neocons and the “deep state” have neutered the Trump Presidency, it’s over folks!
The Saker
VINEYARD OF THE SAKER
Less than a month ago I warned that a ‘color revolution ‘ was taking place in the USA. My first element of proof was the so-called “investigation” which the CIA, FBI, NSA and others were conducting against President Trump’s candidate to become National Security Advisor, General Flynn. Tonight, the plot to get rid of Flynn has finally succeeded and General Flynn had to offer his resignation. Trump accepted it.
[dropcap]N[/dropcap]ow let’s immediately get one thing out of the way: Flynn was hardly a saint or a perfect wise man who would single-handedly saved the world. That he was not. However, what Flynn was is the cornerstone of Trump’s national security policy. For one thing, Flynn dared the unthinkable: he dared to declare that the bloated US intelligence community had to be reformed. Flynn also tried to subordinate the CIA and the Joint Chiefs to the President via the National Security Council. Put differently, Flynn tried to wrestle the ultimate power and authority from the CIA and the Pentagon and subordinate them back to the White House. Flynn also wanted to work with Russia. Not because he was a Russia lover, the notion of a Director of the DIA as a Putin-fan is ridiculous, but Flynn was rational, he understood that Russia was no threat to the USA or to Europe and that Russia had the West had common interests. That is another absolutely unforgivable crimethink in Washington DC.
The Neocon-run ‘deep state’ has now forced Flynn to resign under the idiotic pretext that he had a telephone conversation, on an open, insecure and clearly monitored, line with the Russian ambassador.
And Trump accepted this resignation.
Ever since Trump made it to the White House, he has taken blow after blow from the Neocon-run Ziomedia, from Congress, from all the Hollywood doubleplusgoodthinking “stars” and even from European politicians. And Trump took each blow without ever fighting back. Nowhere was his famous “you are fired!” to be seen. But I still had hope. I wanted to hope. I felt that it was my duty to hope.
But now Trump has betrayed us all.
Remember how Obama showed his true face when he hypocritically denounced his friend and pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.? Today, Trump has shown us his true face. Instead of refusing Flynn’s resignation and instead of firing those who dared cook up these ridiculous accusations against Flynn, Trump accepted the resignation. This is not only an act of abject cowardice, it is also an amazingly stupid and self-defeating betrayal because now Trump will be alone, completely alone, facing the likes of Mattis and Pence – hard Cold Warrior types, ideological to the core, folks who want war and simply don’t care about reality.
Again, Flynn was not my hero. But he was, by all accounts, Trump’s hero. And Trump betrayed him.
The consequences of this will be immense. For one thing, Trump is now clearly broken. It took the ‘deep state’ only weeks to castrate Trump and to make him bow to the powers that be. Those who would have stood behind Trump will now feel that he will not stand behind them and they will all move back away from him. The Neocons will feel elated by the elimination of their worst enemy and emboldened by this victory they will push on, doubling-down over and over and over again.
It’s over, folks, the deep state has won.
From now on, Trump will become the proverbial shabbos-goy, the errand boy of the Israel lobby. Hassan Nasrallah was right when he called him ‘an idiot‘.
The Chinese and Iranian will openly laugh. The Russians won’t – they will be polite, they will smile, and try to see if some common sense policies can still be salvaged from this disaster. Some might. But any dream of a partnership between Russia and the United States has died tonight.
The EU leaders will, of course, celebrate. Trump was nowhere the scary bogeyman they feared. Turns out that he is a doormat – very good for the EU.
Hillary would have been far worse than any version of a Trump Presidency.
In order to defeat Trump, the US deep state has had to terribly weaken the US and the AngloZionist Empire. Just like Erdogan’ purges have left the Turkish military in shambles, the anti-Trump ‘color revolution’ has inflicted terrible damage on the reputation, authority and even credibility of the USA. The first one is obvious. So let me clarify the second one. In their hate-filled rage against Trump and the American people (aka “the basket of deplorables”) the Neocons have had to show their true face. By their rejection of the outcome of the elections, by their riots, their demonization of Trump, the Neocons have shown two crucial things: first, that the US democracy is a sad joke and that they, the Neocons, are an occupation regime which rules against the will of the American people. In other words, just like Israel, the USA has no legitimacy left. And since, just like Israel, the USA are unable to frighten their enemies, they are basically left with nothing, no legitimacy, no ability to coerce. So yes, the Neocons have won. But their victory removes the last chance for the US to avoid a collapse.
(Image by DonkeyHotey)
Trump, for all his faults, did favor the US, as a country, over the global Empire. Trump was also acutely aware that ‘more of the same’ was not an option. He wanted policies commensurate with the actual capabilities of the USA. With Flynn gone and the Neocons back in full control – this is over. Now we are going to be right back to ideology over reality.
Trump probably could have made America, well, maybe not “great again”, but at least stronger, a major world power which could negotiate and use its leverage to get the best deal possible from the others. That’s over now. With Trump broken, Russia and China will go right back to their pre-Trump stance: a firm resistance backed by a willingness and capability to confront and defeat the USA at any level.
I am quite sure that nobody today is celebrating in the Kremlin. Putin, Lavrov and the others surely understand exactly what happened. It is as if Khodorkovsy would have succeeded in breaking Putin in 2003. In fact, I have to credit Russian analysts who for several weeks already have been comparing Trump to Yanukovich, who also was elected by a majority of the people and who failed to show the resolve needed to stop the ‘color revolution’ started against him. But if Trump is the new Yanukovich, will the US become the next Ukraine?
Flynn was very much the cornerstone of the hoped-for Trump foreign policy. There was a real chance that he would reign in the huge, bloated and all-powerful three letter agencies and that he would focus US power against the real enemy of the West: the [Saudi-backed] Wahabis. With Flynn gone, this entire conceptual edifice has now come down. We are going to be left with the likes of Mattis and his anti-Iranian statements. Clowns who only impress other clowns.
Today’s Neocon victory is a huge event and it will probably be completely misrepresented by the official media. Ironically, Trump supporters will also try to minimize it all. But the reality is that barring a most unlikely last-minute miracle, it’s over for Trump and the hopes of millions of people in the USA and the rest of the world who had hoped that the Neocons could be booted out of power by means of a peaceful election. That is clearly not going to happen.
I see very dark clouds on the horizon.
UPDATE1: Just to stress an important point: the disaster is not so much that Flynn is out but what Trump’s caving in to the Neocon tells us about Trump’s character (or lack thereof). Ask yourself – after what happened to Flynn, would you stick your neck out for Trump?
UPDATE2: Just as predicted – the Neocons are celebrating and, of course, doubling-down (see above)
—The Saker
The Essential Saker: from the trenches of the emerging multipolar world$27.95
The Saker is the nom de guerre of a US-based geopolitical and military analyst. His network of sites span the globe and are published in a all major languages.
MAIN IMAGE: Gen. Michael Flynn—No prize by any means, but at least a figure likely to upset the stifling Neocon warmongering stranglehold on US foreign policy. The ignominious and rather transparent way in which his fall—a cynical tempest in a teapot— was engineered, along with Trump’s own abject retreat— adds to the injury.
Note to Commenters
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We apologize for this inconvenience.
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