Saturday Commentary and Review #154

Western (Il)liberal Democracy, The "GDR-ization" of Germany, The Self-Pity of the Wannabe National Censor, China De-Dollarization, UK's Dead Musical Tribes

Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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I think it’s very, very funny that Poland’s previous PiS-run government bent over backwards to support Ukraine in its fight against Russia, only to see it’s exit from rule being celebrated in both Washington (somewhat-mutedly) and in Brussels (loudly). It’s not enough to be very supportive of the goals of these two capitals. It might buy you some short-term goodwill, but not being in perfect alignment with the ever-shifting liberal mores coming out of these two centres of power dooms you to punishment one way or another.

There are always opportunists at home willing to do the bidding of foreign powers, to the point of debasing themselves in order to prove just how far they are willing to go on your behalf. Sure, some many actually believe that men can get pregnant, but most are more than happy to “love Big Brother” if it helps them advance professionally.

Donald Tusk of Poland’s ruling Civic Platform is a case in point: he is not “woke”, he does not believe that men can get pregnant, nor does he buy into other such nonsense. Donald Tusk will say that men can get pregnant if he must do so, because by agreeing that men can get pregnant, he can ensure the powerful backing of both Brussels and DC for his government, allowing him free reign to entrench the rule of his cabal in his home country.

PiS, the party of Polish Catholic conservatism, made two cardinal errors in its time in office:

1. it sought to reform the judiciary by slowly purging it of its communist legacy appointments, who themselves controlled future appointments and thus preserved the Polish judiciary as a centre of their own power, not reflecting the will of the people

2. it rejected western liberal mandates such as gay marriage

Poland naturally sees Ukraine as a buffer between it and Russia, a country with whom it has had more than a slight historical grievance. This mutual loathing certainly powered a lot of Poland’s monumental efforts towards helping Ukraine fend off the Russian invasion. One should not discount that Poland’s then-ruling PiS also saw these efforts as a way to keep Brussels and the US State Department off of its back.

That calculation turned out to be a bad one, and N.S. Lyons has done us all a big favour in detailing just how bad a bet it was:

Poland and the Demon in Democracy

Since entering office, Tusk has moved quickly to prove his particular commitment to “democracy.” Which is to say that, in a particularly striking example of what all of us can now increasingly anticipate whenever “democracy” wins elections in the West these days, he immediately began trampling the constitution in order to jail his political opponents.

First, on January 9, he dispatched police to storm the presidential palace and arrest two opposition lawmakers seeking refuge there. These were former Interior Minister Mariusz Kamiński and his deputy, Maciej Wąsik. Kamiński, a well-known anti-communist and a key figure in freeing Poland from Soviet domination, previously served as chief of Poland’s anti-corruption bureau. He was convicted during Tusk’s previous regime (2007-2014) for allegedly abusing his power while pursuing government corruption with “excessive zeal,” but was officially pardoned by then-new President Andrzej Duda in 2015 – a long-standing point of displeasure for the Polish left.

The desire to jail political opponents is one of the hallmarks of being a ‘banana republic’, as we have been told for decades now. Except that jailing political opponents when done by regimes with the ‘right’ views is in fact “defending democracy”, with the definition of democracy being as slippery as an eel, as the definition constantly shifts like sands in the Sahara Desert. I wrote this following essay not too long ago, and for those who missed it you should check it out:

Anyway, back to Poland:

When [President] Duda pardoned the two men again on January 23, Tusk first stalled on releasing them from prison and then suggested that even though let go they would soon be held “responsible for other things.” Either way, Tusk seems to have won, since having been jailed for a crime the parliamentarians can now be stripped of their seats, consolidating Tusk’s balance of political power. Indeed Tusk is apparently just getting started, as he also arrested former Deputy Foreign Minister Piotr Wawrzyk. Wawrzyk had already been sacked and placed under investigation by the PiS government in connection to a recent visa fraud scandal. But by escalating to an arrest Tusk signaled that he was only in the opening moves of a long-planned “step by step” campaign to purge opposition figures throughout the country.

For instance, Tusk immediately attempted to arrest and prosecute Poland’s serving central bank governor, Adam Glapiński. Tusk has a personal beef with Glapiński, having accused him last year of the unforgivable crime of making monetary policy decisions that made the right-wing government look good during the campaign. So now he wants him gone, even though Glapiński was appointed in 2022 to a second term of six years. Unfortunately for Tusk, Poland’s top constitutional court quickly ruled this particular revenge plot was most definitely illegal, so he had to back down for the moment – but declared rather ominously that “there are other ways to pursue” Glapiński regardless.

Poland has for years been accused of “democratic backsliding”, but you are hearing almost nothing about these purges that Tusk is currently engaging in. You should already know why you aren’t hearing much about them in western media.

The crux of the matter:

The courts themselves are Tusk’s top target. He campaigned on “restoring the rule of law” to Poland. By this he meant unlocking more than $100 billion in EU funds meant for Poland that the bloc has frozen on the grounds that PiS “politicized” the courts. These sanctions were imposed in response to PiS reforms to allow more judges to be appointed by elected officials – and therefore face at least some measure of democratic accountability, as in most Western countries – rather than be appointed by each other. This incestuous practice had led to Poland’s allegedly-former communist judges universally appointing new progressive allegedly-not-communists in an unbroken cycle of hegemonic left-wing institutional control. According to the EU, however, legally breaking this oligarchy was a form of “democratic backsliding.”

So Brussels set out to undermine Poland’s right-wing government as punishment. By freezing the funds ahead of the election, then blatantly signaling they would be restored only if Tusk was elected to implement his plans, the EU effectively held out a massive bribe to help induce the Polish people to vote correctly. Naturally, as soon as Tusk took power the EU quickly moved to release some $5 to 7 billion in initial funds for a job well done. This after Tusk’s coalition immediately began packing the National Council of the Judiciary (a constitutional body overseeing Polish judges) with its own partisans – despite the allegation of PiS doing something similar being exactly what provoked the EU’s howls about “undermining judicial independence” in the first place. But then, “There’s lot of appetite in Brussels to help Tusk out and release at least part of this money and ensure that this change in Poland is reflected not just in rhetoric but in some hard cash being handed out as incentive to continue with those reforms,” as Jakub Jaraczewski, some kind of NGO creature, accurately summed it up for the Financial Times.

Tusk is doing precisely what Poland has been asked to do for some time now….and he and his government are being rewarded for doing so.

Wait…there’s still more!

Tusk then only escalated his effort to rapidly take control of the legal system. His new justice minister and chief political attack dog, Adam Bodnar, attempted to fire and replace the country’s national prosecutor, Dariusz Barski – except that by law the appointment or removal of this position is contingent on agreement by the president, leading Duda to accuse Bodnar of engaging in “flagrant violation of the law.” Bodnar then simply declared that Barski had been appointed “without a proper legal basis” and therefore never actually held office at all. So now Barski exists in a state of quantum-political limbo, either national prosecutor or not, depending on who you ask.

And:

None of this has given pause to Tusk or his boosters in Brussels, however. Rather, his actions have been widely lauded in elite media as a model for other leaders to follow when confronting “populists” and the “far-right.” As Maciej Kisilowski, a law professor at the Soros-funded Central European University in Vienna, wrote in an opinion piece for the Financial Times, “These decisive, if heavy-handed, actions come at a time when democrats globally are searching for strategies to deal with populists.” Legal experts might, he said, be “questioning the procedural legality of some of the recent moves. But the results are notable.” “Tusk is proving that democracy can bite back. That will certainly not endear him to the rightwing electorate, but it can engender a measure of grudging respect and, ultimately, compliance.”

“Compliance”. “Heavy-handed”.

In order to shore up liberalism, illiberal methods are not only permitted, but encouraged, against those whom they accuse of “democratic backsliding” aka illiberalism.

The serpent is eating its own tail.

Click here to read the rest of this excellent essay.

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It seems that this weekend’s SCR will have a theme: (il)liberal democracy (which to be honest, is a constant theme here anyway). After looking at Poland, we now turn our gaze toward its neighbour, Germany.

At present, there are three issues that tower over all the rest in Europe’s most important country:

1. the looming threat of the country’s de-industrialization as a result of its turn away from nuclear power and from cheap, reliable, Russian oil and gas

2. farmer’s protests (which have been subject to media suppression and/or blamed on “populists” (read: Nazis)

3. whether or not to ban AfD

The first issue represents the result of a series of ‘own-goals’ scored by Germany. It primarily began with idealism centred around green energy and its viability as a replacement for nuclear power. A mistake, but one that could be fixed. But then it compounded the error by its slavish devotion to the USA and its foreign policy objectives, ones that did take into consideration German national security interests whatsoever. German leadership decided that US interests should take precedence over their own, declaring that they are indeed a protectorate and not at all a sovereign state.

It’s this last issue that speaks to the theme of (il)liberal democracy. German (and other western media) are now openly discussing whether to ban AfD or not. Examples include Der Spiegel, POLITICO Europe, UK Guardian, and others. Not to be outdone, party officials of the ruling SPD are saying that “it can be one and would probably work”. Things are already headed in that direction as its youth wing has been ruled by the courts to be an ‘extremist’ organization, and thus can be spied on by the state’s domestic surveillance agency. The democratic will of a large segment of Germany’s citizens must be suppressed “in the name of democracy”. Throw Trump in jail, throw Polish politicians in prison, shut down AfD. This is the state of liberal democracy today.

Elena Louisa Lange argues that Germany today is undergoing a process of “GDR-ization” (GDR referring to the German Democratic Republic, the official name of communist East Germany):

The GDRization of Germany

And here we are: a new State Socialism seems to have gripped the entire political class, with its “correctness” in speech, its Red-Green Party state Central Committee directives ordering us what to eat, in what houses to dwell, what cars to drive, and how to travel, its ordering of the consumption of the designated political view by the threat of designation, the ecstatic lust of denunciation and the setting up of denunciation platforms precisely for its satisfaction, and its whole collectivist spiel. As though that wasn’t enough to prove anyone right who suspects the return of the GDR, in the last few weeks, the Social Democratic and Green government technocrats have called on the population in mass protest marches against the opposition party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) – and consequently for the government. This was common praxis in the GDR who called on Germany’s Socialist Unity Party’s (SEDs) cadres, the production managers of their Publicly Owned Enterprises (VEB), state school teachers, higher employees of the bureaucracy, and other State Planning Commission nobility to lead marches against the civil opposition. People who did not join were denounced.

This illiberal turn in Germany is referred to as “technocratic totalitarianism” by Elena, when you combine that rising illiberalism with the fact that the same parties continue to run the country year in, year out. And yes, it’s built on “lies”:

Needless to say, the war of the German political elite against its citizens is not fought with F-117As (yet), but a no less extensive net of lies. A government-sponsored news platform in the “fact-checker” business called “Correctiv” purported to have exclusive information on a “secret meeting” of AfD and conservative politicians at a villa by a lake near Potsdam, immediately dubbed “Wannsee-Konferenz 2.0”, in which plans of “deportation” of millions of non-ethnic Germans, regardless of their German citizenship, emerged and were openly discussed. It is true that a meeting took place in the villa, but it was in the spirit of a crowd funding for a new radio project (though I could not determine whether this was about sponsoring my former employee Kontrafunk, a dissident radio station), a private meeting of businessmen and women, albeit in the presence of Martin Sellner, a right-wing Austrian writer. That any plans for “deportation” were made at this meeting turned out to be made up, and Correctiv had to withdraw that statement from its “fact-checking” site.

The official fact-checkers had failed to fact check themselves (thus failing in their stated mission of defending democracy) by doing what exactly that which they are supposedly defending against.

The ”Correctiv” investigations, however – conducted like a 1940s black and white spy movie set in foggy Nazi Germany and suitably presented in the form of a screenplay – were blown out of all proportion and accordingly disseminated in left-wing state media, so that, as we hear, “millions” of people marched in solidarity with the government “against right-wing extremism” on the streets of Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, and smaller towns. A welcome side effect of course being that everyone stopped reporting on the farmers’ protests, while tractors still occupied main roads of the German capital.

Protesting farmers are “populists” after all.

I bet most of you haven’t heard of this next bit:

None of that came as a surprise for Hans-Georg Maassen, former president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution who lost his position under Merkel for questioning the reality of “Neo-Nazi mobs hunting down migrants” in an incident happening in Chemnitz in 2018, in which one person lost his life. While an independent commission confirmed that indeed no such thing as a “Neo-Nazi hunt” happened in Chemnitz, Maassen, who was a member of the CDU until recently, was already gone and made up his mind about the Merkel fraction. And with good reasons. Unlike some politicians in the AfD, Maassen was adamant about the protection of the German constitution, which also includes knowing where to set its limits and knowing that it should not become instrumentalized for political purposes.

Maasen failed to live up to the new program and had to be removed:

…..but since the new president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Mr. Thomas Haldenwang, has called for the “decent parts of society” to march in protest against “right-wing extremism”. And, unsurprisingly, Maassen himself, who has finally formed his own political party, and expressed concern about the anti-democratic tendencies of the current Bundesregierung, is now monitored by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the irony of which is palpable.

The increasing illiberalism of western liberal democracy:

As he convincingly claims, Germany – but probably the West more generally –  has undergone a shift in the perception of the term “democracy”. No longer does democracy mean belief in freedom and equality between people in a system of government based on this belief, in which power is either held by elected representatives or directly by the people themselves. Democracy has undergone a stealthy shift towards what the German Democratic Republic originally meant by it, namely “socialism”. In an interview with the Swiss Weltwoche, Maassen said:

“The left has managed to achieve hegemony in the media by introducing a concept creep regarding the term democracy. It is now fair to say we have a concept of democracy that was used in really existing socialism. This means that only those who stand by socialist ideas are democrats. In the GDR, democracy was also a matter of course. That is not cynicism. People simply saw themselves as democrats under socialism. Those who stood outside of this socialism were the fascists, the imperialists, reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries.  And we are currently seeing this change in the concept of democracy in Germany, too, when people talk about left-wing parties as the "progressive forces" or use devisive language like “we, the democrats". By this, [the politicians] mean that only socialists are democrats, and I, who am an avowed anti-socialist, am a fascist, a counter-revolutionary, a reactionary from their point of view. The CDU has not yet understood that this is a different concept of democracy that is now being used. And of course they want to be on the good side. The result is that the CDU has turned into a cartel party of the socialist bloc and does not want to be on the outside, because otherwise it will also be one of the fascists and counter-revolutionaries.”

Elsewhere, Maassen saw the transformation towards totalitarian rule “under the pretense of the social question” as another indicator for the GDRization of Germany.

The increasing illiberalism of the self-proclaimed “defenders of democracy” is the greatest sign that they are becoming increasingly desperate in their efforts to retain their grip on power, so much so that the obvious self-contradictions contained within their philosophy are becoming plain to see.

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It is a testament to how silly and craven US politics are these days that Nina Jankowicz is still given a platform to urge for government-mandated censorship of social media in her country.

You might remember Nina from the very short-lived Disinformation Governance Board that was run out of the Department of Homeland Security. She was named the head of this office, until an overwhelming backlash against government-run censorship forced the Biden regime to SHUT IT DOWN. Nina believes that Russia actively intervened in the 2016 election to tip the scales in Trump’s favour. She also believes that Russia runs efforts akin to US State Department “Colour Revolutions” in Europe, while denying that her country does the same. She states that the 2020 US Eleciton was the “most secure ever”, and insists that efforts to combat COVID-19 fell victim to disinformation efforts from players, both foreign and domestic. Nina expressed doubts abour the origins of Hunter’s laptop, naturally…..she is also concerned with Elon Musk owning Twitter/X.

This past week, Foreign Affairs gave Nina access to their very important platform so that she could vent not just about the failed efforts to censor the American public at large, but also about the ‘harrassment’ that she has faced for daring to heroically censor free speech:

Nearly eight years after Russian operatives attempted to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, U.S. democracy has become even less safe, the country’s information environment more polluted, and the freedom of speech of U.S. citizens more at risk.

“We must censor to protect freedom of speech!”

Wew.

And yet the country has been unable to rein it in because the very subject has become a partisan, politicized issue. Lawmakers have not been able to agree to common-sense reforms that would, for instance, require more transparency about the actions of social media companies or about the identity of online advertisers. In the process, they have enabled an environment of hearsay, in which many people, particularly conservatives, have used false or misleading information to raise the specter of a vast government censorship regime.

The Disinformation Governance Board was indeed a vast government censorship regime initiative.

I have had a unique view of this slow-motion failure. Between 2012 and 2016, I worked on democracy-support programs in Europe and Eurasia when Russia was auditioning the disinformation tactics it would later employ in the United States. I heard regularly from my colleagues in Georgia, Poland, and the Baltic states about Russia’s attempts to influence their political systems and derail their efforts to integrate with the West; Russian agents would launch cyberattacks, stage paid-for protests, and deploy armies of trolls all in an effort to create the illusion of grassroots support for pro-Russian causes abroad.

She worked on US influence programs, lamenting that others do the same? When she does it, it’s “democracy promotion”, of course. Also, don’t forget that these “Russian efforts” are exaggerated to a degree that is too embarrasing to even discuss politely.

But then the same salacious, captivating disinformation narratives came for me. In 2022, I was appointed the executive director of the Disinformation Governance Board, a new body in the Department of Homeland Security that would help coordinate anti-disinformation efforts within the agency. At no point did the board or I have the mission or ability to suppress or censor speech—the board’s charter made that explicitly clear. But soon after its unveiling, partisan political operatives pounced and subjected the board and me to a baseless and ruthless assault, claiming that I sought to clamp down on conservative speech. They misrepresented the board’s purpose, maligned me and my work, and spurred a torrent of death threats targeting me and my family.

Instead of backing the board and me, the U.S. government caved. It paused the activities of the board. I resigned, and the board was disbanded a few months later. The United States had failed to stand up to the very disinformation it had sought to fight. And its broader, ongoing struggle to grapple with disinformation bodes ill not just for the country but also for democracies around the world.

Not letting Nina censor you makes her an undeserved victim, as her censorship regime would have been benign, and actually, democratic and good and nice-smelling, and physically attractive, and so on.

Read the rest of her expository self-pitying here.

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For some time now, I have been very critical of writers and pundits who foresee the imminent demise of the US Dollar, one of the two key strengths of Pax Americana. Many point to BRICS as being the vehicle that will bring this about, but I like to remind people that the official BRICS’ bank, the NDB, is actually in compliance with US-led sanctions against Russia. You can read my critique here:

This does not mean that there are efforts being made to “de-dollarize” economies around the world. It’s the smart thing to do, if you are opposed to the United State of America. The problem is that it is very, very hard to do, and will take quite a bit of time, if at all possible.

Zongyuan Zoe Liu of the US Council on Foreign Relations explains why China seeks to de-dollarize, and why it’s important:

Ganzhou, a landlocked city that once served as a revolutionary base for the Communist Party of China, is not a typical tourist stop for visitors to southeastern China. Spread across an expanse larger than Maryland, however, the city boasts a population that rivals New York City and an economy similar in size to Alaska.

Known as the “Rare Earth Kingdom” and the “Tungsten Capital of the World,” Ganzhou today serves an important role in the Chinese government’s overall effort to use mineral exchanges as a way to increase the use of its currency, the renminbi, and improve its pricing power in global commodities markets.

Home to the headquarters of the China Rare Earth Group — a state-owned behemoth born from the 2021 merger of three of China’s largest state-owned rare earth enterprises — Ganzhou now produces nearly 70% of the country’s rare earth mineral products, with China fulfilling roughly 90% of global demand.

This is important, because:

The metal exchange, established in 2019 with the approval of the State Council, now operates as a subsidiary of China Rare Earth Group. It is China’s second mineral exchange, which was established to use the renminbi to price and trade minerals and rare earth products.

The first such exchange, the Baotou Rare Earth Products Exchange, which started operating in 2014, is jointly owned by 14 major Chinese rare earth suppliers and was explicitly set up, at least in part, to increase China’s overall role in pricing rare earth products. To that end, China also launched two renminbi-denominated exchanges — oil futures in 2018 and copper futures in 2020 — on the Shanghai International Energy Exchange.

By establishing commodities exchanges across its industrial cities, China aims to boost the use and power of the renminbi in global commodities pricing to establish an alternative global financial system that is less reliant on the almighty dollar. This effort also involves regional cooperation with China’s neighbors and non-Western multilateral partnerships to develop regional currency arrangements and enhance the use of local currencies in international trade and investment.

This makes a lot of sense.

The Chinese view:

In China’s telling, these strategies are less about offense — trying to dethrone the U.S. dollar or replacing it in the global system with the renminbi — and more about defense: strengthening China’s financial security and reducing its geo-economic vulnerabilities within the existing dollar-dominated global economic and financial system. Beijing wants to minimize its exposure to a potential dollar liquidity crunch and ensure its continued access to global capital markets even during times of geopolitical crisis.

No Chinese leaders have publicly expressed an intention to dethrone the dollar despite escalating geopolitical and trade tensions between the U.S. and China beginning in 2018. However, as those tensions persist, Chinese financial regulators and scholars have explicitly expressed concerns about Beijing’s vulnerabilities and urged government officials to step up efforts to protect the financial system.

Fang Xinghai, vice chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, has cautioned that China should urgently prepare for the possibility of being removed from the U.S. dollar-based global payment system — a form of “forced financial decoupling.” In such a scenario, Chinese entities would lose the ability to access the U.S. dollar or use it to conduct international transactions.

Fears of the USA doing to China what it has already done to Russia:

Since President Xi Jinping came to power in 2013, he has repeatedly emphasized worst-case scenario thinking to “prevent macro-risks that may delay or interrupt the process of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

From Xi’s vantage point, China’s state-owned financial institutions and enterprises must inoculate themselves against potential international sanctions in the event of a military conflict with the West over Taiwan. That concern has only grown more urgent after China witnessed the collective sanctions imposed by the West on Russian entities and individuals to punish President Vladimir Putin for his war against Ukraine.

The West’s decision to freeze Russian foreign exchange reserves has caused particular consternation in Chinese policy circles. Chinese economist Yu Yongding described such a move as “a blatant breach of…trust” and proof of the United States’ “willingness to stop playing by the rules.”

This is a very well-written piece. Click here to read the rest.

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We end this weekend’s SCR with a look at “How Britain killed off its musical tribes”:

From the Fifties through to the end of the Eighties, this informal system of creative destruction roughly held. But then something went wrong. Though certain styles have a vague Noughties aura, there is little to fundamentally distinguish the way a teenager of today might dress from in 2004, or even earlier. And music is now consumed and sought out in a radically different way. A friend of mine who has been a well-known goth DJ for some years, told me that he was recently spinning records at Slimelight in London, a fixture since 1987, the “world’s oldest dark scene club playing ebm, electro, goth, futurepop, dark techno & trance, industrial”. The description itself is a measure of how much music scenes have fragmented into micro-categories. A young person came up to the booth and requested some “rock” music: when he asked her to be more specific, it turned out that she couldn’t name a single group or even a song she might prefer. She even seemed unclear as to what exactly rock might be in the first place.

It’s the sort of thing to give an old NME rockist an aneurysm. But it also marks a fundamental cultural change from the 20th century, when the category of “genre” was a fierce battlefield. Even “fame” has become compartmentalised. In their day, the Rolling Stones and the Sex Pistols were catapulted onto the front pages of newspapers and broadcast into millions of homes. A pensioner in the Sixties would have heard of (and probably loathed) Mick Jagger. But in our own time, acts can rack up colossal download figures while remaining almost completely unknown to anyone outside their own particular fan base.

Click here to read the rest.

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