Saturday Commentary and Review #128
Germany's Greens in Disarray, "Residential School Denialism" in Canada, Spain's "La Trump", Sweden as Uniquely Swedish, "The Journey of Man" at 20
The politics of France and Germany are heavily represented in the Saturday Commentary and Review on this Substack for good reasons:
France continuously flails about trying to preserve its polite ruling elite while attempting to not only lead Europe, but securing its economic interests abroad, often at the expense of its fellow Europeans
Germany continues to debase itself in ways that grow more comical by the day
Western English language media has barely touched on how Angela Merkel and her CDU party effectively threw the last Bundestag elections to the “Traffic Light Coalition” consisting of the SPD, Greens, and the FDP. It is a subject that is very worthy of exploration, but few seem interested in completing the task. What we do know is that this coalition was heaven-sent for the USA, as it arrived just in the nick of time i.e. the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The Greens in particular were given the softest of touches in German media during the election campaign, with horrific examples of bias including TV journalists applauding their answers on live TV. I’d share a link with you (because I have seen it with my own eyes), but Google and YouTube are not as easily searchable as they once were. Hopefully German speakers can help out here.
The German CDU was not playing ball with the USA over Nordstream 2, insisting on the need for cheap and reliable Russian gas to power its massive industry, the underpinning of its export-driven economy. On the other hand, the Greens promised to scuttle ties with Russia, adopting a hawkish foreign policy, while retaining its anti-nuclear power stance atop its traditional pro-environmental platform. Dumb people of all stripes rushed to support the Greens, because “Environmentalism = good, Russia = bad”. What they failed to calculate in their heads was how Germany could maintain its economic output by cutting itself off from reliable sources of energy.
Green Party co-Leader and current Vice Chancellor and Minister of the Economy for Germany Robert Habeck has conceded the point, warning that Germany could shut down whole industries if access to Russian gas (that is still flowing through Ukraine) is completely cut off:
Germany may be forced to wind down or even switch off industrial capacity if Ukraine’s gas transit agreement with Russia isn’t extended after it expires at the end of next year, according to Economy Minister Robert Habeck.
Habeck, who is also the vice chancellor, issued the stark warning Monday at an economic conference in eastern Germany, saying that policymakers should avoid “making the same mistake again” of assuming that the economy will be unaffected without precautions to secure energy supplies.
A 12 year old could have predicted this outcome, but Habeck and the coalition that he takes part in decided to try their luck anyway. They have up come short.
Despite the full-scale invasion of the country by Kremlin forces in February last year, Ukraine is still earning transit fees by allowing Russian gas to flow through its territory to countries like Austria, Slovakia, Italy, and Hungary.
Even if some supply continues beyond 2024, it’s unlikely that the current transit agreement will be extended under similar conditions, given the lack of political support, according to a report by the Center on Global Energy Policy published last week.
“Direct negotiations between Ukraine and Russia on the extension of the transit contract look highly implausible in the current environment,” according to the reports authors, Anne-Sophie Corbeau and Tatiana Mitrova.
I’m not even going to bother adding a comment to this excerpt.
Germans have finally realized that they were conned by Habeck and friends, leading to a significant drop in support for the Greens, and growing demands for him to resign as Minister of the Economy:
There was a time when Robert Habeck seemed unstoppable.
Throughout last spring and summer, the German vice chancellor and economy minister was leading in popularity polls as he steered the EU's largest economy through the energy crisis triggered by Russia's war and accelerated Germany's rollout of green energy.
With his direct and authentic communication style, the Green politician appealed to many voters, be it by recording a shaky but emotional smartphone video urging more military support for Ukraine or by not mincing words (and even coming close to tears) when describing the challenges and past failures of Germany's energy policies.
Media outlets, including POLITICO, occasionally called him "the real chancellor" — setting off alarm bells for the actual chancellor, Social Democrat Olaf Scholz, as Habeck had made no secret of his ambition to lead his Green party to victory in the 2025 general election and become Germany's next leader.
Fast forward to today, and Habeck-mania has turned into Habeck-dismay: Half of all Germans want him to resign, a recent poll found. Also, his party's approval ratings have tanked: The Greens are down to 14 percent, from 23 percent last summer, according to the average of national polls analyzed by POLITICO's Poll of Polls. Habeck, meanwhile, finds himself at the lower end of popularity ratings for top German politicians.
Habeck's downturn is linked mainly to an unpopular heating law at the core of the Greens' efforts to transition German households to renewable energies. A cronyism affair in Habeck's economy ministry further affected his popularity and reputation.
Adding to the injury, the party's political nemesis — the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which denies the threat of climate change and the need to act — has managed to seize on the energy policy controversy and risen to 18 percent in polls, now ousting the Greens as Germany's third-strongest political force.
“Climate Change” as an article of faith, and the need to combat it no matter the economic implications for ordinary Germans has tanked his popularity:
The clear downturn for the minister and his party, however, came after a contested heating law earlier this spring. The law seeks to tackle Germany's problematic dependence on fossil fuels by banning — apart from a few exceptions — new installations of gas and oil heating in buildings as of 2024, replacing them with climate-friendlier alternatives such as heat pumps. But those can cost around €20,000 more per installation than gas heating.
The Greens had hoped that most Germans would understand the need for such a drastic step, given the acute energy crisis and climate emergency. But conservative politicians and the media blasted the law as an unreasonable financial burden for many households.
Implications for Europe as a whole:
The tumble of Habeck and his Greens is being closely watched in Brussels and other European capitals, as it raises questions over how serious the EU's biggest economy is with its ambition to reduce dependency on gas and oil. The EU has an overall target of reducing net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55 percent by 2030, and achieving climate neutrality in 2050.
Despite lip service from all three German coalition parties in committing to these goals, the recent controversy has laid bare how it's mainly the Greens paying in lost popularity for potentially painful implementation. Any political price of pushing through such measures will serve as a lesson not for only future German governments, but for other countries as well.
The “incorruptible Greens” are corrupt:
Green policy clash aside, the cronyism affair at his ministry may prove most damaging to his reputation in the longer term. Habeck delayed for weeks before dismissing his top state secretary Patrick Graichen, who had recommended the best man at his own wedding for a top government post and approved a government-funded project for an NGO where his sister is an active board member.
Habeck said last month that the decision to dismiss Graichen had been "tough," but conceded that his state secretary had made "one mistake too many."
The affair was particularly embarrassing for the Greens, a party that includes transparency as among its core values — but once in power, appeared to be just as susceptible to corruption as any other party.
The German Greens are the worst party in Europe: fanatical believers in Climate Change who insist on upending how all Germans (and Europeans) live their daily lives in order to slay this dragon, war hawks who demand regime change in Moscow, and de-industrialists, whether openly or by accident.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” is a quotation often attributed to the French writer, historian, and philosopher Voltaire, even though he never said it. The actual quote comes from Voltaire biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall in her book “The Friends of Voltaire”. She crafted this quote to represent Voltaire’s view on the necessity of free speech.
Voltaire lived much of his life in Bourbon France, a polity with a strong Catholic component, including laws against blasphemy. To a liberal like Voltaire, blasphemy laws were anachronistic and a suppression of fundamental human rights. Liberals like him believed in the right to free thought and expression for all, as liberals were to not only tolerate others, but their views and opinions as well.
All societies have rules against blasphemy. Some encode them into law. Others, like the USA, use roundabout methods to punish those who blaspheme against what is deemed sacred at present by ruling elites. Americans are in theory protected by the First Amendment that grants them the right to free speech, something that is entirely absent in the rest of the western world.
Take Canada, for instance.
Canada has laws against “hate speech” on both the federal and provincial levels, including in the criminal code. Even though the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (part of the Canadian Constitution) guarantees the right of freedom of expression for individuals and the media, it also recognizes that these rights are subject to reasonable limits. Therein lies the rub; you have the right to freedom of expression, but only within certain limits. Complete and total freedom…..unless you cross this line.
This “line” is what separates protected speech from blasphemy, and that line is ever-shifting.
Canada’s Justice Minister David Lametti has this past week come out in favour of legal action against “Residential School Denialism”. Residential School Denialism is defined (at least in this news report) as “those who challenge communities when they announce the discovery of possible unmarked graves”. The graves being referred to here are those of Native children who attended residential schools set up and funded by the federal government and run by certain churches in order to educate First Nations, Metis, and Inuit children.
The claim is that many childrens’ remains lie in unmarked graves throughout the country, victims of mistreatment while attending these schools.
Two years ago, the NY Times reported that the remains of 215 natives were discovered at a Kamloops, British Columbia residential school. Canadian media went apoplectic with the news, resulting in national self-flagellation, political denunciation, and arson against Catholic churches. In fact, no graves were found to exist over a year later in Kamloops.
This hasn’t stopped the Canadian government from seeking to criminalize “Residential School Denialism”, however:
Canada should give "urgent consideration" to legal mechanisms as a way to combat residential school denialism, said a Friday report from the independent special interlocutor on unmarked graves.
Justice Minister David Lametti said he is open to such a solution.
Kimberly Murray made the call in her newly released interim report, just over a year after she was appointed to an advisory role focused on how Ottawa can help Indigenous communities search for children who died and disappeared from residential schools.
Her final report is due next year and is expected to contain recommendations.
Watch this:
In her interim report, Murray raised concerns about increasing attacks from "denialists" who challenge communities when they announce the discovery of possible unmarked graves.
They want to legally punish people who question the iron-clad existence of something that they themselves classify as only a possibility. Let that sink in for a second.
Check this out:
"This violence is prolific," the report said. "And takes place via email, telephone, social media, op-eds and, at times, through in-person confrontations."
The definition of violence is expanding in direct relation to the contraction of the definition of democracy. This is not a coincidence. I wonder if Kimberly Murray considers my Substack to be “violent”?
Murray said Canada has a role to play to combat this sentiment and that "urgent consideration" should be given to what legal tools exist to address the problem, including both civil and criminal sanctions.
"They have the evidence. The photos of burials. The records that prove that kids died. It is on their shoulders," Murray told a crowd gathered Friday in Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan.
"The government of Canada and the churches must step up," Murray said.
They lack the bodies though, and many of these Native groups are denying access to these sites. Canadians are being told to give the government the benefit of the doubt, and are being threatened with legal action, including criminal, if they don’t:
Lametti, who appointed Murray to her role, said that he is open to all possibilities to fighting residential-school denialism.
He said that includes "a legal solution and outlawing it," adding some countries have criminalized denial of the Holocaust during the Second World War.
The federal government followed suit last year, amending the Criminal Code to say someone could be found guilty if they wilfully promote antisemitism "by condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust."
Believe us, or shut up. If you open your mouth, you will be prosecuted by the law.
I’ll be monitoring the developments in this scandal as it continues to unfold. Canada seems to be envious of the USA’s racial insanity because it doesn’t have a similar historical narrative with which to beat itself up repeatedly. Will mistreatment (real, fake, or somewhere in-between) let Canada in on the self-flagellation party?
One thing is certain; it will contribute to the erosion of what remains of free speech in the Canadian context.
Where “monsters” do not exist, the media needs to create them in order to slay them. Case in point: current President of the Madrid region in Spain, Isabel Diaz Ayuso.
Der Spiegel has published a boring profile of her, one so dull that they have totally failed in their attempt to smear her as some sort of extremist, equating her to Donald Trump (La Trumpa) as a “Hail Mary pass”.
She is a member of the Spanish PP (People’s Party), a run-of-the-mill centre right political party that often forms the government in Spain:
Few Spaniards had even heard of Ayuso a couple of years ago. Now, the former journalist governs Madrid, one of the country’s most important and powerful regions. Ayuso has become a star of the conservatives. Within her party, few dare to question Ayuso’s power, and there has even been speculation that she might ultimately seek the Spanish presidency.
In Spain, Ayuso is either loved or loathed. Children wear T-shirts printed with her image, and some bars have photos portraying her as the Virgin Mary. But her critics paint her as a danger. She reminds them of Donald Trump and they wonder where it will all lead.
There’s never a dull moment with Ayuso. Sometimes she downplays climate change, sometimes she tells an opposition leader to do her crying at home. During the pandemic, she lambasted Podemos, the left-wing coalition partner in Pedro Sánchez’s government, as being "worse than the virus." She’s known for lines like: "When they call you a fascist, you know you’re on the right side of history."
Der Spiegel has so far listed her disagreement with Climate Change orthodoxy as an example of the “danger” that she poses.
A member of the conservative People's Party, Ayuso has been sharply criticized for her loose coronavirus containment policies. She allowed restaurants and bars to largely stay open, and there were times when masses of young French people flew to Madrid to party. The city paid an enormous price for her policies: Madrid recorded one of the highest death rates in Spain during the pandemic. Reporting by the Spanish media also found that, during the first, particularly horrible wave of the pandemic, Ayuso's government prevented ill senior citizens from being taken from nursing homes to crowded hospitals. Thousands of people died because they didn’t receive medical treatment.
Not instituting a full lock down I guess is example number two. Madrid had policies and procedures in place, which I saw with my own two eyes while I was there. It wasn’t totally open, nor entirely shut down.
As Ayuso takes the stage and begins her speech, her features harden. She shouts that Spanish Prime Minister Sánchez wants to turn Spain into an ultra-leftist country. That Sánchez is weakening the monarchy and the capital. She tells them that he and his people "despise Madrid because Madrid doesn’t elect them." And that Sánchez lies every day. That he treats people like cattle. The crowd applauds.
So?
The Ayuso way is also the MAR way – when she makes appearances on TV, the ratings go up, he says. And the TV stations are fully aware of that, he says. That’s why, for years now, everything has revolved around Ayuso – all the stations need her pugnacity for their ratings. She sets the agenda, and her competitors riff on her and her positions – not the other way around. Ayuso’s approach works because Spanish society is already polarized, a development she is further reinforcing.
Mainstream media will always accuse one side of polarization, never the other. If you read the article, you will note how Der Spiegel downplays PM Sanchez as “rather harmless”, something that millions of Spaniards would reject outright.
Ayuso, of course, denies wanting to take over from the party’s lead candidate. She says her place is in Madrid. But if you let her talk long enough, she also says things like: "It’s true that many citizens would like to see me as the head of government." But she says her party already has a candidate: Feijóo.
There’s much to suggest that Feijóo may indeed be allowed to try his luck in the election at the end of the year – and that he will have to go if he doesn’t win. That’s when Ayuso’s hour could strike. "She would be the logical successor," says political scientist Pablo Simón. "Under her, the People’s Party would move further to the right."
What does this even mean? Where is the actual implied extremism? She sounds like someone who opposes the government, just like more than half of Spain in total.
Der Spiegel is lazily trying to make a mountain out of a molehill.
Most people when asked to define Sweden would describe it as a social-democratic state with a strong welfare regime. Liberals will tend to elevate it as an example for others to emulate. Rightists will note that it is currently gripping with increasing violence from some immigrant communities.
COVID-19 threw a wrench into this vision as Sweden surprisingly rejected shutting the country down during the pandemic. “How could such a responsible country not care for the health of its citizens”, many were left wondering. Anti-lockdown types cheered this fit of “libertarianism”, hoping that their countries would look at Sweden and reverse their own approach to the pandemic.
In this interesting essay, Lars Trägårdh argues for the uniqueness of the Swedes:
In reality, Sweden is sui generis. To understand Sweden, it is necessary to begin with the tug-of-war between two powerful human impulses: the desire for individual sovereignty and the unavoidable necessity of being part of society. To describe this condition, the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant coined a phrase that has since become a classic concept in social thought: der ungesellige Geselligkeit, ‘asocial sociability’. We humans, he claimed, have an innate impulse to associate with our own kind. We must be part of a community, not merely to survive but in order to develop our innate abilities. But this requirement, both ethical and necessary, also elicits from the individual a kind of resistance that threatens to dissolve the community.
All human beings, Kant argued, have a predisposition to isolate themselves, rooted in a desire to arrange everything according to their own fancy. And yet this contradiction is not merely some tragic circumstance that condemns humanity to unending unhappiness. In fact, as the 19th-century Swedish philosopher Erik Gustaf Geijer saw, movement between community and autonomy serves to strengthen each element:
The more individuals seek to detach themselves, the more acutely they feel the baleful nature of this necessity, which, even under conditions of reciprocal hatred, forces them to forge ever-closer bonds of mutual dependence.
Confronted by this existential paradox, all societies have sought to find a balance between the imperative of social virtues and the individual’s desire for freedom. However, the solutions to this universal dilemma have differed around the world. Some societies have erred on the side of social and political control, minimising individual freedom. Others have sought to diminish state interference in the private domain, and instead trust in the market, families and voluntary solidarity in civil society. Sweden is of interest because it has created a social contract embracing a strong state but in the service of an extreme form of individual autonomy. It has not compromised in either direction but has embraced the Kantian paradox head-on – and with gusto.
Should we interpret this as state-sponsored atomization? The author refers to it as “statist individualism”:
In a seeming paradox, Sweden has managed to combine high levels of social trust and a faith in collective institutions with an affirmation of individual autonomy. As comparative studies of social trust – as well as trust in institutions – show, Sweden stands out as a high-trust society along with other countries (Germany and Austria). At the same time, as the World Values Survey (2017-22) data show (see Figure 2 below), Sweden is also extreme when it comes to the stress on values that emphasise self-realisation as well as those that view the individual, rather than family, clan, religious community or ethnic group, as the fundamental units of society. This stress on individual autonomy is in turn linked to related values such as attention to gender equality, children’s rights, and the rights of sexual minorities. The name I have given to this alliance between state and individual is statist individualism.
This next excerpt will piss off a lot of people (it has already pissed me off):
Today, while social conservative critics at times bemoan this state of affairs, suggesting that dependence on the state breeds social isolation and loneliness, studies show that the elderly themselves appear to benefit. Not only do the elderly in Sweden and the other Nordic countries report higher degrees of happiness, but they are also more satisfied with their social networks. This research furthermore points to what is the essence of the Swedish theory of love, namely that social relations are voluntary, not ascribed – based not on duty but on free choice.
Choice over Duty. The freeing of the individual from all constraints, responsibilities, and duties.
To illuminate the Swedish peculiarity in this regard, it helps to compare Sweden with Germany and the US, countries that in many ways are similar. All three are rich, vibrant, democratic market societies. Yet they sport radically different forms of social contracts, based on fundamentally different moral and political logics. To assist the comparison, the figure below is useful. It depicts a triangle drama, of sorts, involving the State, the Individual, and the Family/Civil Society, and how the dynamic works out in the three countries.
In Sweden, the dominant side is the one connecting the state and the individual. The state is viewed positively and one of the simplest expressions of a high-trust society, such as Sweden, is the willingness on the part of citizens to pay taxes. Individual rights are ‘positive’, taking the form of social rights and investment in individuals. In the US, on the other hand, the state is viewed with suspicion. The constitution and the political culture are characterised by a lack of trust in the state and a desire to protect the autonomy of the family and the Churches, as well as stipulating a bill of rights, ‘negative’ individual rights that seek to guard individual freedom from state power. Here the strong side is rather the one connecting the individual with family/civil society. In Germany, conversely, the key side is the one linking the state to family/civil society. The state is regarded as important in guaranteeing equal access to fundamental civic resources like education and healthcare, but with respect to actual implementation of social services, these are – whenever possible – to be delegated to the family and nonprofit organisations in civil society.
This is a very interesting essay that I suggest you should read in full here.
We end this weekend’s Substack with a look at the 20th anniversary of the documentary “The Journey of Man”. This essay was written by its producer, Spencer Wells
, and was my introduction to the field of Human Genomics.The next year would be one of the most transformative of my life. Filming in a dozen countries on six continents over the course of a year, writing, re-writing, arguing about what to include and what to cut, and slowly piecing together the story of the greatest journey in human history. Learning to become a television presenter did not come naturally to me at all, but I grew into it (if you know the order in which we filmed the segments you can see my evolution as the production progressed). In the end, we delivered the films - one 90mins for NatGeo to allow for commercial breaks, the full two hours to PBS - in September of 2002. At the end of October that year the accompanying book was published in the UK, which we launched at the Royal Geographical Society in London. It was my first ever presentation on the ‘big picture’ of the human journey, and one that I would give in modified forms in hundreds of lecture venues around the world over the next two decades. Late November and early December 2002 brought a whirlwind world tour to promote the premiere of the show on the National Geographic Channel, with ‘media training’ (it’s as uncomfortable as it sounds) in Washington, DC, followed by events in the UK, India, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, and finally Dubai. Dizzying, exhausting, and a very steep learning curve for someone who has always tended to be more of an introvert than an extrovert.
You can watch the entire documentary for free here:
I thank Spencer for having made this documentary, and I have been obsessed with the subject ever since.
Read the rest of his essay here:
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