Saturday Commentary and Review #117

Battered Wife Germany to 'Lead' Europe Against Russia?, EU Leaders Rush to Beijing in State of Panic, AI 'Charlatans', The Ayotzinapa Mystery, The Irish Tenor McCormack

As the Russians continue to chip away at Ukrainian positions in four or five different places in Donbass, everybody is waiting for the UAF to launch their long-anticipated “counter-offensive”, one will that will no doubt aim to split Russian-occupied Kherson from Donetsk via a drive down to Melitopol from just south of Zaporizhzhia.

At the same time, HIMARS would be used to try and take out the bridge from Crimea to the Russian mainland once and for all. If these two objectives are met, the Crimean Peninsula would be isolated and difficult to re-supply. We can only wait and see for now, as speculation is idle.

This coming Ukrainian offensive is supposed to be manned by some 200,000 soldiers that have been held back thus far from the front, most of whom having received training by NATO forces either in Western Ukraine or further west in Europe. It is this anticipated offensive that the neo-conservatives have gone all in on, pushing the claim that if it shows success, then Russia can in fact be “defeated”.

There is a larger picture coming into focus if one steps back a bit: the American desire to hand off day-to-day management of this conflict to Europe so that it can move on to its bigger target, China. The USA has found an irreplaceable ally in Poland, but it doesn’t have enough heft to hold the fort while it goes east. Post-Brexit UK does not have the ability to bring the EU into line since it is now on the outside. That leaves only one option: Germany.

So far, Germany has seen its source for cheap and reliable gas that powers its industrial-based export economy blown up, while it has been pilloried for not stepping up to do more to harm that source. Germany has fallen victim to a classic protection racket made worse by government coalition partners siding with the racketeers. If that wasn’t enough, its allies have continued to play tricks on it, mocking it, and forcing it to act against its own interests (and not just Nordstream). Germany is the “battered wife” of the West, as Wolfgang Streeck so eloquently describes:

Tempting as the prospect of a way out of the Ukrainian quagmire might be, there are signs that the United States is tilting toward a second, alternative approach, which we may call the Europeanization, and indeed the Germanization, of the war. Remember Vietnamization? While it ultimately didn’t work – in the end it was the United States that was defeated, not its regional substitute, which was never more than a figment of American imagination – it did create some breathing space for the US. It also enabled its propaganda machine to sell to the American public the prospect of an honorable retreat from the battlefield, the battle turned over to a politically reliable and militarily capable bona fide ally.

Why Germany?

Who could do the job? Not the European Union, clearly. While its leader, Ursula von der Leyen, had been a defence minister when she moved to Brussels, she was widely considered an incompetent one, and only narrowly escaped a parliamentary investigation into her pitiful performance. More importantly, the EU has no real money, and who in Brussels decides on what with whom is a mystery even for insiders, which typically makes for slow, ambiguous and unaccountable decisions – not useful in a war. Nor can the job be given to the United Kingdom, which by exiting has cut itself off from the law-making machinery of the EU. Also, the UK already serves as a global aide-de-camp for the United States, helping it build a worldwide front against China, potentially the next target of its forever war. Equally out of the question is the famous French-German ‘tandem’, a contraption of which nobody knows for sure whether it is more than a journalistic or diplomatic chimera.

This leaves Germany itself – and indeed looking back one feels that it has for some time been groomed by the United States as its lieutenant commander for the Ukrainian section of the global war for ‘Western Values’. Germanization of the conflict would spare the Biden administration from having to indebt itself to the Chinese for helping it pull out of a war that threatens to become domestically unpopular. Efforts to draft the Germans as European auxiliaries can draw on the legacy of the Second World War, which includes a strong US military presence in Germany, still based in part on legal rights going back to the country’s unconditional surrender of 1945. Right now, there are about 35,000 American troops stationed in Germany, with 25,000 family members and 17,000 civilian employees, more than anywhere else in the world except, it appears, in Okinawa. Dispersed all over the nation, the United States maintains 181 military bases, the largest being Ramstein in Rhineland-Palatinate and Grafenwöhr in Bavaria. Ramstein served as an operational headquarters in the War on Terror – among other things coordinating the shuttle flights for prisoners from all over the world to Guantanamo – and continues to be the command post for American interventions in the Middle East.

Germany would sometimes pursue foreign policy independent of the USA in the past (Will Brandt, Schroeder’s rejection of the war in Iraq, etc.), but those days are now long gone:

By 2022, however, the decline of the Social Democratic Party and the rise of the Greens had weakened German capacity and indeed desire for a modicum of strategic autonomy. This was evidenced two days into the war by Scholz’s Zeitenwende speech in the Bundestag, which if anything was a promise to the United States that insubordination of the Brandt, Schröder and Merkel sort would not happen again.

Making a fool out of Germany, Part 1:

Instead, the first year of the war saw a series of tests of the true depth of the German conversion from postwar pacifism to Anglo-American Westernism. When no more than a few weeks after the Zeitenwende speech, sceptical observers noted that the €100 billion had not even begun to be spent, it was not enough for the German government to point out that the new hardware had to be ordered before it could be paid for, and that before it could be ordered it must be chosen. So, to show its good will, Germany hurried to sign a contract for 35 F-35s with the United States government – not, as one might have thought, with its manufacturers, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. The plane, long an object of desire for the Green foreign minister, is to replace the allegedly outdated Tornado fleet Germany maintains for its ‘nuclear participation’. For an estimated price of $8 billion including repair and maintenance, the planes are promised to be delivered towards the end of the decade, with a unique proviso that the American government may unilaterally adjust the price upwards if it deems expedient.

Making a fool out of Germany, Part 2:

As it turned out, the F-35 deal got the Germans no more than a short reprieve. While the service branches and lobbyists from Germany and beyond fought over what the rest of the fund would best be spent on, Scholz, to appease American impatience, fired the defense minister, an old SPD party hack who had been appointed against her will to satisfy imagined public demands for gender parity. Shortly before her dismissal, one of her would-be successors, serving as Bundeswehr ombudswoman, demanded that the €100 billion be increased to €300 billion. A few days later the job went to someone else, Boris Pistorius, up to then interior minister of the state of Lower Saxony, a man also lacking military experience but radiating something like all-round managerial competence. One of the first things he did was resolve an until then carefully cultivated ambiguity in the Zeitenwende speech, which was whether the €100 billion would bring the regular defence budget up to the NATO-sanctioned 2%, or whether it was to be in addition to the 2%, like a fine for past negligence. According to Pistorius it was the latter, so regular defence spending would have to grow by €10 billion every year, for several years, above and beyond whatever was spent of the Sondervermögen. Moreover, when the general secretary of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, about to become head of the Norwegian central bank – a sinecure if there ever was one – let it be known that 2% was from now on just the minimum, Pistorius was among the first to agree.

Self-abasement:

Meanwhile, in September 2022, the next test, again a tough one, was the destruction of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines by, according to Seymour Hersh, an American-Norwegian hit squad. Here the task for the German government was to pretend they had no idea who had done it, to keep silent on the matter, and to get the press either to do the same or tell the public that ‘Putin’ was the culprit. This test was brilliantly passed. A few weeks after the event, when a Bundestag member – alone out of 709 MPs – asked the government what it knew, he was told that for reasons of Staatswohl – the well-being of the state – no such questions would be answered: not now, not in future. (The day after Hersh had made his findings public, the Frankfurter Allgemeine reported on it under the heading, ‘Kreml: USA haben Pipelines beschädigt’ (Kremlin: US damaged Pipelines).

Making a fool out of Germany, Part 3:

Scholz at first, as usual, offered one reason after another why, unfortunately, no Leopards 2 could be supplied. In response, some of Germany’s allies, in particular Poland, the Netherlands and Portugal, let it be known that they were willing to donate their Leopards, even if Germany wasn’t. Poland even announced that they would send Leopards to Ukraine, if need be, without a German license – a legal requirement under German arms export policy.

The way this story played out may have been of formative importance for the future course of events. Cornered by its European allies, Germany no longer objected to sending Leopards to Ukraine, provided the United States also agreed to supply their main battle tank, the M1 Abrams (another worldwide export hit, with a total production up to now of 9,000 pieces).

……….

At this point, however, around the time of the Munich Security Conference, two unpleasant surprises ensued. First, it turned out that Germany’s European allies, now that German resistance had been overcome, discovered all sorts of reasons why they had to hold on to their Leopards, export licenses or none, leaving the provision of battle tanks essentially to the Germans. (All in all, NATO armed forces command an estimated total of about 2,100 Leopards, of both the 1 and 2 models.) Second, American investigative reporting, particularly in the Wall Street Journal, revealed that the Abrams tanks would show up on the scene only in a few years’ time if at all, something that the German negotiators seemed to have overlooked, or had been asked to overlook by their American counterparts, and had certainly not been shared with the German public.

In the end, then, the Scholz government was left holding the bag – as practically the sole supplier of battle tanks to Kiev.

The German Greens as America’s willing agents:

Among large parts of the younger generation, moral idealism covers up the crude materialism of killing and dying. Within and around the Green party, something like a new taste for heroism has emerged, among what was until a short time ago considered a post-heroic generation. No parents, indeed no grandparents are around anymore who can offer firsthand accounts of life and death in the trenches. Dreams have arisen of a sanitized warfare, executed strictly according to the Hague Convention, at least on our side – no longer a matter of war and peace but one of crime and punishment, with the ultimate aim, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of human lives, of Putin having to stand trial in a court of law.

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Within the Green generation, nationalism as a source of social integration has effectively been replaced, more than anywhere else in Europe, by a pervasive Manicheanism that divides the world into two camps, good and evil. There is an urgent need to understand this shift in the German Zeitgeist, which seems to have evolved gradually and largely unnoticed. It implies that, unlike in a world of nations, there can be no peace based on a balance of power and interests, only a relentless struggle against the forces of evil, which are essentially the same internationally and domestically. Clearly this bears some resemblance to an American conception of politics, shared by neocons and Democratic idealists alike, and embodied by someone like Hillary Clinton. The syndrome seems to be particularly strong on the left side of the German political spectrum, which would in the past have been the natural base of an anti-war and pro-peace, or at least pro-ceasefire, movement.

Streeck is savage in taking the German Government to task over the treatment of Germany by its allies. Click here to read the rest.

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It’s not just Germany debasing itself, it’s all of Europe (minus the Poles, Balts, and Romanians).

Call them satraps, vassals, or regional franchise managers of USA Inc., it’s all the same. They all work against their own best interests to serve the dictates of the Americans. Not only are they short-sighted, they are stupid too.

In the wake of Xi’s history-making three-day visit to Moscow to meet with Vladimir Putin, Europe is now left scrambling, wondering how it can continue to do business with China in light of it openly siding with Europe’s US-appointed enemy, Russia.

As we saw in the piece in the first segment above, it has become a tradition for the USA to leave Europeans holding the bag in the wake of their political and economic policies. Credit Suisse had to be sold before it collapsed (and now behemoth Deutsche Bank is tottering as well), adding another example of “when the USA sneezes, Europe catches a cold”. During the Financial Crisis of 2008, Greenspan testified that much of the risk stemming from subprime mortgages bundled into mortgage-backed securities was offset by selling them to the Norwegians, who were left holding the bag that time. I can’t find the video now, but I do recall Greenspan being unable to hold in his laugh while he testified to this fact.

From the Politico piece:

BRUSSELS — European leaders are suddenly falling over each other to get to China.

Amid growing concern that Chinese leader Xi Jinping is hardening his support for Russia’s war in Ukraine, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced on Thursday he will fly to Beijing for talks next week. Emmanuel Macron, the French president, will follow on a longer-planned trip on April 4. 

A succession of European Union leaders used a summit in Brussels to raise the alarm about China’s ostentatious backing for Vladimir Putin this week, warning that they could not stand by while Beijing and Moscow cement an alliance that risks tipping the world deeper into crisis. 

Politico is an Atlanticist publication, so they are lying here. The concern is first and foremost economic, because of US actions against Chinese companies like Huawei, which force Europe to pick sides. It is now beginning to dawn on Europeans that not only are they not allowed to do business with the Russians, but that America insights on oversight as to what kind of business they will be allowed to do with China in the future. We already see this with US pressure applied to the Dutch company ASML. They provide the most advanced semiconductor tools, but are being forced to cut back on business with China.

We have to read between the lines:

Even without a military escalation, tensions are rising between Beijing and the West over security and trade. In recent weeks, a series of European governments have hit Chinese-owned social media company TikTok with restrictions, amid concern that Beijing’s dominance of technology poses a security risk to the West.

At the same time, EU governments are drawing up plans to limit their reliance on China for critical raw materials such as lithium for electric car batteries.

Speaking to media during the summit in Brussels, Latvian leader Krišjānis Kariņš described the Xi-Putin meeting in Moscow as “eye-opening for Europe.”

The meeting, he said, showed that “China is not taking the role of a broker [but is] moving overtly on the side of Russia and this is a difficulty for all of us.” Kariņš added that Beijing has the driving seat in its relationship with Russia, but it remains unclear where they want to drive this relationship.

The conceit in Europe among its useless political class seems to have been that it would choose the West over Russia.

Again, read between the lines:

While EU leaders raised fears over the closer Moscow-Beijing ties, there was no consensus in Brussels on whether the bloc as a whole should adopt a new approach to China.

Luxembourg's Prime Minister Xavier Bettel called for continued engagement with Beijing to try to bring the Chinese closer.

We might need China one day

"China is not perfect, but we might need it one day," one EU official said. "Several member states share this assessment."

Others, though, are seemingly in support of a tougher line on China given the latest situation. 

Macron’s diplomatic adviser, Emmanuel Bonne, talked to top Chinese diplomat Wang Yi on Thursday. “China expects France and other European countries to play a part in … pursuing political resolution,” Wang said.

The USA is confident that it can take on Russia through Ukraine’s NATO-backed military, and China via the Quad+economic sanctions. Europeans are beginning to realize that the price for both adventures will be shouldered by them.

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With GPT-4 all the rage now in the AI (Artificial Intelligence) sector, it is high time to consult my old friend, Scott Locklin. Scott has long held the position that we are not living in an age of rapid technological advancement, but instead we are experiencing the opposite: complete tech stagnation.

I’ve mentioned many times that I do not think technology is advancing in a serious way. By “a serious way” I mean something like what happened between 1820 and 1970. That kind of progress is apparently over. What we have now in the way of technology is 1970s DARPA funded technology made available to the masses and leavened with javascript. Also atrocities like electric cars, and frippery like my car using radar to make up for having shitty visibility. Against all evidence, all historical perspective: we still have people trying to sell us the idea that… right around the corner … is some kind of miraculous new thing which will increase human power over nature and fuel the next burst in economic productivity. In the 1990s and early 2000s it was supposed to be nanotech. Nanotech has finally been laughed out of existence among serious people as an actual technology; even its inventor seems to have abandoned it. Allegedly serious people in the mid-late 2010s thought “AI” was just around the corner. After all, deep neural nets were able to identify human-cropped German traffic signs slightly better than K-nearest neighbors, and slightly better than (apparently astigmatic) humans. As a result of this and some improvements in GPS, my car is now able to tell me, with perhaps 90% accuracy, what the traffic signs I can see with my own eyeballs say.

We’re again going through such a mass hysteria, with featherheads thinking LLMs are sentient because they’re more interesting to talk to than their redditor friends. The contemporary LLMs being a sort of language model of the ultimate redditor. People think this despite the fact that since the 2010-2015 AI flip out which everyone has already forgotten about, there hasn’t been a single new profitable company whose business depends on “AI.” It’s been over 10 years now: if “AI” were so all fired useful, there would be more examples of it being used profitably. So far, the profits all go to data centers, NVIDIA, and nerds who know how to use PyTorch. A decade after they invented the airplane there was an entire industry of aircraft manufacturers, and they were being used productively in all kinds of places. You’d figure if “AI” were important, it would be used profitably by a single solitary AI oriented firm somewhere. As far as I can tell, it’s only used to goof off at work.

Scott has a polemical style, to say the least:

Of course, other than some advances in applied mathematics, we do not presently move ourselves into the future in any useful sense: mostly things just get older and more difficult. For example,  the US, a country allegedly much more wealthy than in 1969, has a hard time sending human beings into low earth orbit, and is so far a mere 10-20 years behind schedule in sending up another mission to the moon. We also have a harder time keeping the lights on than in the past; this despite the bet that electric cars will be the new mass transport technology. Yet, money is made on online ad platforms, so we have nincompoops who think they know something about “technology” because they won a VC lottery ticket on selling a shabbier, more intrusive version of the yellow pages.

On AI:

Now that the “bring ourselves into the future” meme has switched from nanotech to AI to quantum computards back to “AI,” we have various centers for “responsible AI” and “open AI.” There are “singularity institutes,” “future of humanity institutes,” “Machine Intelligence Research Institutes” and “singularity universities” which postulate some kind of “AI” is going to get so damn smart, it will program itself to be even smarter in a sort of intellectual perpetual motion machine.

Just as with large scale quantum entangled forms of matter, nobody has the slightest idea how to do this. Consider the fact that the “autonomous vehicles” meme is finally dying a deserved death. We’re probably not much closer to truly autonomous vehicles than when Ernst Dickmanns invented the field back in the 1980s. Some things are much easier now than back then (machine vision, LIDAR), but the fundamental problem remains. Yet, despite the preposterous failure of autonomous vehicles; reddit man informs me that “AI” is right around the corner because muh chatGPT. If it is, I’d like to see chatGPT park their car for them.

The trajectory of actual machine learning “AI” technology is pretty straightforward and not very interesting or science-fictioney. The actual future societal implications of machine learning seems to be a government-corporate surveillance dystopia, with public-private witch hunt partnerships for political control. Jobs and manufacturing will continue to be outsourced from the West (the main “AI” which are taking jobs: Aliens and Immigrants) to increase the power of the oligarchs. It’s been the obvious trajectory for decades now, and shows no signs of abating. Hell if I were paranoid, I’d assume the spooks invented dystopian crap like Facebook in anticipation of the civil unrest resulting from deindustrialization.

Tech today as a “Millennialist Cult”:

Eventually this historical progress concept mutated into ideas of scientific and technological progress: our present Faustian civilization in the West. Since actual progress in technology broke down some time in the 1970s, we have a lot of post-Christians who think, as a matter of faith, that Faustian tier improvements are still happening. They point to their nerd-dildos as evidence of progress, rather than evidence that they’ve been psyoped into carrying around a sulfurous machine which is essentially the slave-shackle of the emerging dystopia. Periodic hysterias over amusing toys like chatGPT or imaginary nonsense like nanotech or quantum computing are basically a sort of millenerian cult.

There are a few of you subscribed to this Substack who are actively engaged in the AI sector. Is Scott right?

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Computer hacking used to be so, so innocent. Early media portrayals (with the obvious exception of WAR GAMES) limited themselves to thieves stealing money from banks via code injection, to pranks such as taking control over the computer of others. Wikileaks changed all that, with hacking finally being accepted as a security threat that could have global ramifications.

Like any tool, whether the result is negative or positive depends on the actor who uses it (and beyond that, the perception of others as to what they have accomplished), and using computational devices to hack is no different. Complicating matters, we often learn quite a bit through what are clearly illegal acts.

For example, these past several months have seen many journalists, both Mexican and foreign, comb through 6 terabytes of information that were made available thanks to a hack of the Mexican Defense Ministry last year by an anonymous collective calling itself ‘Guacamaya’. Is this ‘collective’ an independent actor? A state actor? A contractor? We don’t know. What we do know is that they stole roughly 4 million emails and records from the Ministry, resulting in:

…….a steady stream of breaking-news stories about diverse topics, including:

• The Mexican military’s current use of the Israeli surveillance platform “Pegasus” to spy on human rights activists by infecting their mobile phones, despite President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s repeated public assertions that his government does not spy on journalists or political opponents;

• The surveillance of feminist groups by the Mexican military from 2017 to the present;

• Joint intelligence operations by U.S. counternarcotics agents and Mexican military personnel to target criminal organizations trafficking fentanyl;

• The Defense Ministry’s plan to create an enormous new tourism business – administered by the Mexican military – that would include parks, museums, hotels, and a new national airline.

This report being published by the NSA Archive will raise eyebrows, with accusations that it is politically-tinged. The more conspiratorially-minded will suggest that the hack might have been committed by US contractors to make Mexico’s President look bad.

This report focuses on the Ayotzinapa case:

The records reveal that the Mexican armed forces were closely monitoring the Ayotzinapa School long before 43 of its students disappeared in 2014. In a 2006 secret intelligence report from the headquarters of the 35th Military Zone (based in Chilpancingo, the state capital of Guerrero), the school is described as a breeding ground for “subversives,” which, “from its beginnings [in 1926] was identified with social groups antagonistic to the government.” The military’s language on Ayotzinapa is the language of counterinsurgency: Due to “the ideological penetration” of foreign ideas, notes the report, “the school has an active and important participation in social conflicts, at the local and national level.” The example given in the report is the armed revolutionary (and Ayotzinapa graduate) Lucio Cabañas, who was assassinated by army forces in 1974 (and who is the subject of a National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book from 2003) [Document 1].

No guerrilla leader has emerged from Ayotzinapa in the nearly 50 years since Cabañas’s death, but multiple military records from the Sedena data set continue to associate not only the school but its teachers, students, alumnae, and diverse supporters with what the military calls “the agrarian conflict.” Networks of individuals and institutions believed “connected” to the school and its mission appear in military intelligence documents, such as a 2007 report showing a “diagram of Ayotzinapa links.” The report identifies a variety of armed groups, well-known journalists, campesino organizations, local politicians, and members of one of the major political parties, the center-left Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) – including future president Andrés Manuel López Obrador – as Ayotzinapa supporters [Document 2].

Background on the case:

The Ayotzinapa case began on September 26, 2014, when a group of students from the school were attacked by security forces and members of a criminal gang as they traveled in buses through the town of Iguala. A night of violence and gunfire left three students and three bystanders dead and dozens of people wounded; 43 students were taken away by police and never seen again. The parents of the missing boys mobilized, calling on then-President Enrique Peña Nieto to find their sons and demanding the government investigate those responsible.

From the beginning, questions were raised as to the actions of the Mexican military during the attacks. Iguala hosts a major army installation – the headquarters of the 27th Military Infantry Battalion – and soldiers were seen circulating throughout the various crime scenes as the violence unfolded for hours, from the evening of September 26 into the early morning of September 27. When international investigators loaned by the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights to assist in the case (known as the group of experts, Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes—GIEI) asked to interview soldiers from the battalion, then-Secretary of Defense Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda refused, telling the press: “I can’t permit my soldiers to be treated like criminals or to be interrogated so that they are later made to feel that they had something to do with [the night of Iguala] instead of being supported.”

Click here to read the rest.

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We end this week’s Substack with a look at John McCormack, a celebrated Irish Tenor from the first half of the 20th century:

Before reading further, stop whatever you’re doing, put some headphones on and listen to this song. You’ll recognize the melody from Danny Boy but the lyrics are different. It has me in tears every time.

Personally, I have never heard of him. In my mind, all Tenors are Italian (or Spanish):

Alright. So who was John McCormack? He was one of the most famous stars in the world in his day and is considered by some the best tenor of the early twentieth century. But the early twentieth century is a long time ago and those who remember the height of his world fame first hand have passed on. Born in Ireland in 1884, the son of mill workers in a family of eleven children, his talent was first nurtured in the church where he sang in the choir in his home town and later in Dublin. At 21, he went to Milan to train in the Italian style, which you can hear in his early recordings. Very crackly but still magnificent.

Click below to read the rest:

The Great Irish Tenor

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