Macron's Massive Gamble, Former AfD Member Krah on European Crisis, Losing Turkey?, Those Darn Post-Liberal Catholics, Rediscovering Fun and the Need For It
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It’s been an incredibly hot few weeks here in Europe, and the heat is not very conducive to thinking….or writing
A lot of writers take vacation during the dog days of summer - often recycling old content - I don't think any of us would mind you taking some well deserved time off to recharge ya know!
1. It is abundantly obvious why Macron called the election when he did. He has to have the election before france and various othet American catamites openly and directly intervene in the War Against Russia, lest the election be seen as a referendum on that war.
Anyway, the AfD will be banned. It's only a question of when. Any political force that dares challenge American Hegemony over europe can expect the same, on any pretext.
2. The reason the various alt-conservatives can get along is because they have no power and have no prospects of ever getting power. People less likely ever to get power can scarcely be imagined. (Assuming he is elected, Trump will continue to be weak, stupid and easily manipulated. He will govern like a more dysfunctional Dubya.)
Alt-conservatives are a fringe phenomenon. No significant sector of industry would benefit from their support or needs them. They have no mass constituency. They exist to entertain, misdirect, confuse. They will play no role in the politics of the foreseeable future and don't deserve one.
If he is returned to office Trump may well be effective, but only in relation to fiscal or trade policy. He will be constrained in every other area.
All you need to do is take the average frustrated alt-conservative and try to imagine him (it's almost always a "him") with any kind of influence and authority. The n try not to snicker.
These dweebs make campus Marxists look like hard-headed calculating power brokers by comparison.
"Anyway, the AfD will be banned. It's only a question of when. Any political force that dares challenge American Hegemony over europe can expect the same"
That's way too reductive and misses the German context. It's not only (or even primarily) about geopolitics either, the crucial issue is immigration. Essentially SPD and Greens (and much of CDU/CSU too) have decided on a radical project of societal transformation through mass immigration, and anybody who objects is declared a public enemy. American hegemony only matters to that insofar as similar trends are playing out throughout the West.
I suspect that german leaders could toss refugee children alive into piranha tanks and nobody would raise a peep, as long as their knees resolutely hit the floor when an American snapped his fingers.
See, e.g. Nordstream. For that matter. germany is importing tens of thousands of very white and very racist Ukrainian refugees and nobody has a problem.
WRT your second paragraph: That "nobody has a problem" is because those who stay will become the new 'gastarbeiter' (and, hopefully, help with the "Muslim" problem).
Since not many of those Ukrainians are working and their arrival wasn't planned for, a much simpler explanation is that immigration isn't much of a priority for european elites.
DC won’t be coming into the office after the already started long summer vacation.
Lol.
They’ll be remote… and… then…nothing…
Don’t believe me?
Try and get past voice mail.
Or an email response.
In fact little by little the contracted out government, which is all that was actually done for 2-3 decades is.. laid off little by little… and they aren’t replaced.
objectively speaking, chances of an AfD ban are low. first, it's a risky move, unlikely to succeed in the way that they want, and it could fail and make things worse. second, there are many intermediary things they could do that are safer and may even be more effective.
I've written about this before. Banning the party involves a protracted judicial procedure, which will a) go on for a long time (during which support for AfD will skyrocket), and which b) has high chances of failing. Depending on how heavily infiltrated AfD are by domestic intelligence, a ban might not even be possible: see precedent of NPD. Meanwhile it does nothing about AfD supporters, it will further alienate the new states and split east from west Germany even more. In short, if they wanted to ban AfD, they should've done it before 2015, it's probably too late now.
Intermediary steps are smarter, less drastic, require less protracted procedures, and entail less risk:
1) Cutting the AfD off from their public funding. All parties in Germany receive public funds to campaign for elections and so forth, cutting AfD funding would really hurt them, is easier than an outright ban, less likely to backfire. Chances they do this relatively high.
2) Declaring AfD 'confirmed right-wing extreme' via the BfV. There would be legal challenges, a big fight, but if the cartel parties prevail then AfD lose some important protections, suddenly the 'neutrality' rules that require equal representation in state media are withdrawn, it's easier for the press to smother the party.
3) A state-level ban. This is my bespoke theory but I think they'd try a state-level ban somewhere in the East, maybe as a trial balloon, before trying to ban the party nationally. Thüringen (with the FaSCiSt Björn Höcke) would be the big candidate here. But, this is still risky for the same reasons I outlined in the first paragraph, it's just that the risk is limited.
Interesting. I don't have time to go into it in detail, but the alternatives that you describe are basically banning without using the word "ban".
That said, a lot has changed since the NPD. Hell, since then, following the War On Russia turning hot, Germany has drooped freedom of speech, the press and opinion like they were so many hot turds and nobody raised so much as a peep.
re:Turkey, punditry never mentions that Turkey is in fact sidelined via the new command structure chiefly because of the new Joint Force Command headquartered in Norfolk, VA aka "kinda NATO sort of"
Well. It’s always a big deal in the American Military when Generals wives have to pack teacups and furniture. Moving to Norfolk will save a lot of grief.
Question for the German friends: does anyone have manufcaturing export numbers and the like post nordstream blow up? And any anecdotal perspective on the current "vibe" in Germany, wrt to the rising rightwing influence and loss of confidence in Brussels?
I would describe the public political 'vibe' in Germany as hysterical and hypermoral. Hating AfD in the open is a continuation of hating Corona measure critics and hating people, who call for peace in Ukraine without being partisan. Sure, there is growing defiance against the government and woke culture, but a reasonable dialog between political opponents is impossible for a long time. For a positive vibe in the right-wing camp it is necessary, that the tensions within the AfD party calm down and that the party stays united. More and more Germans should find their way to alternative media in order to break the spell of mainstream media and shift the Overton window in favour of remigration. It's a metapolitcal struggle while the economy is going south and political repression is rising.
USA “collapse” ™️ ; the collapse of the Democratic Party, of which Trump is just the Usher IS national institutional collapse outside of business, although Finance is part of the same government party system.
The Democratic Party’s reach and control of all institutions except some businesses and the rank and file police and military, otherwise the Democratic Party IS the National Government.
Yes of course many state and local governments are Republican, but everything National is RINO for a reason, no choice.
The Democratic Party collapsing is the collapse of the ruling party and official religion of government, education, academia, the bureaucracy, many of the Churches Hierarchy, the Intelligence Community, certainly our actual Financial System and decades of relationships centered on the Capitol.
Now as America is an extremely resilient Federated system in every way at every level, we’ll do better than most countries at weathering the storm.
But have no illusions the Collapse of the Democratic Party is collapse of our Public National Institutions.
We’re really going to have to get serious about money.
I would not be surprised if the collapse functions as a strategic bankruptcy, leaving costs distributed globally with selected jurisdictions within the US relatively unscathed.
Re money, several US states have passed laws enabling the use of precious metals to settle tax liabilities, lifted duties on tbe sale of precious metals and established bullion deposit facilities. The next step is for banks/states to issue fully convertible and negotiable certificates for precious metals. When the dollar goes, life will get Old School very fast indeed.
Mark Lilla's tone is condescending and irritating. Nonetheless the Catholic postliberals like Deneen and Vermeule appear to miss a key point: communitarian politics assumes the existence of communities. This is not necessarily a very sound assumption. In the real world hyperindividualism, atomisation and desocialisation have eradicated communities. Political ideas that are derivatives of nostalgia just don't connect with real world conditions.
We don’t have universal atomization, I certainly live in a real community. I think most people do still. This may not be evident in certain urban or suburban areas or at certain levels. Nothing is more natural than humans establishing community.
I was generalising about national politics and should have been more careful.
Real communities exist aplenty but they do not generate political force of the kind necessary for national level communitarian politics. The oases of sanity and normality remain but their ability to direct politics or extract concessions from Washington is limited.
It is unclear to me how things will pan out. As the centre weakens the ability of the Feds to impose upon the regions falls. If/when counties, cities and states can shrug off consent decrees that empower the DoJ then communitarian politics becomes substantial.
The people most heavily invested in US national government are the governments of Europe and Australasia plus banks the world over.
Having turned the country into an economic zone and a global commons Washington may well try to survive by inviting foreign governments to take over one or other piece of North America. I have no trouble imagining something like the cantonments that the Europeans and Japanese once maintained in China or the foreign concessions in Tangier. It might not be as explicit as that, but there is real potential for that sort of mischief.
Look all the Liberals and the Progressives have had to do since the 1960s to collapse anything anywhere is be themselves. They crack out (make into slums) anything they touch. Hell I heard off Yale Campus that New Haven Connecticut is a slum.
These are neoliberal vampires who can’t face reality of their situation and convince themselves they’re doing Gods work- decades after defenestrating God. Funny how it was this one little legacy of prayer and service once a week that kept them sane. Well.
Thank you Professor Rawls, that will be all…because you see… Dorian Gray of Plymouth didn’t know about his picture… but he just saw it on the Telly June 27th, 2100 EDT, 0400 GMT June 28th.
That’s it, he’s running..from consequences and from himself.
Nowhere to go.
Antiquity and Absurdity have been invoked and they will answer.
The most competent neoliberal regime on earth is Dubai.
If you don’t know that’s a glittering airport and palaces and a Manhattan skyline in the sand surrounded by cinder block ghettos full of Asian servants it is, go and see. I did. But Emir Ibn al-Vegas 😉 knows WTF he’s doing…
America has done much to weaken itself, just in the last 10 years alone. It saddens heading into July 4 next week, especially for my young children. We all have agency, but state actors are hard to arrest or alter while on their strategic drift.
The one article discussing conservatives’ penchant for nostalgia—sure. But the idea suggested toward the end that Reaganism started us on some YOLO approach to living, and church be damned, is also simplistic. I think it must also be a stealth indictment of the Enlightenment. Yet for a long time before that, we had emperor, king or church, and the modern competitors like the supreme soviet were not great. So I don’t think life under those structures was better—tho I guess serfdom, ignorance, and hunger are clarifying. And, plainly, the wealth we broadly enjoy today only came by unleashing the individual, both in natural and corporate form.
"I think it must also be a stealth indictment of the Enlightenment."
You're saying Lilla is criticizing the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason? How so? I would think he's saying the low-status "far right" types are merely stupid and superstitious, and need re-education, or fed more seduction and persuasion, and if that fails, damned as haters, racists, sexists, homophobes, etc. All abstractions that mean nothing, and which intellectuals love to death.
Agreed. You should see his introductory essay to the recent publication of “Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man”. It’s a master class in fundamentally misunderstanding the topic at hand LOL. This article was very much of a piece with the Lilla I know and am mildly bemused by.
July the 4th for Britian, Americas Independence Day, that is not by chance it is planned for that date for a reason, I expect many statements to be made in Britain and USSA, all bad.
I predict that Britain will fall into a Civil War during or after the next Global War.
"If RN manages to breach the cordon sanitaire in France, it opens the way for AfD to do the same in Germany"
Given that RN has declared AfD too radical and thrown them out of the ID faction in the EU parliament (which was promptly cited by the German establishment as additional justification for their repression, "AfD is too extreme even for Le Pen"), I don't quite see the logic of that. Franco-German relations are pretty bad now not just on the establishment level, but also between the respective right-wing parties (and let's face it, nationalists are unfortunately frequently too parochial and narrow-minded for successful transnational cooperation, this is a big problem for the European right).
Anyway, Krah's ill-advised comments about the SS (which weren't really wrong though...he didn't deny SS was a criminal organization, he didn't deny the massacres committed by Waffen-SS either, and he didn't bring up the topic in the interview...it was a trap he was foolish enough to walk into) were only a pretext. Something else is going on there. I'm not quite sure what, but Götz Kubitschek (important publisher on the German hard right with close ties to Krah) claims it's about geopolitics, Krah's positive view of the "multipolar world order" and the attempt to establish a pro-American right in Europe (and somewhat surprisingly Kubitschek isn't just critical of the usual suspects like Meloni in this regard, but also of Victor Orban and his CPAC ties):
Again, I'm not sure if Kubitschek is correct about this, and at this stage it may be foolish for AfD anyway to entertain thoughts about influencing geopolitics. There are more immediate matters at home that are more relevant for most voters.
Tories replaced immigration from Poland with mass immigration from Pakistan. Now the Brits will replace them with Labour who will allow even more mass immigration from the Third World.
The details of Turkey's hosting of US nuclear weapons are so fascinating. The stockpile is in Turkey, at a Turkish air base, but under US control.
But... from 2019 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists:
"Of the five nuclear weapons storage locations in Europe, Incirlik Air Base in Turkey stores the most – about 50 or one-third of the weapons in Europe, although there are unconfirmed rumors that the weapons may have been withdrawn."
Hit the like button at the top or bottom of this page to like this entry. Use the share and/or re-stack buttons to share this across social media. Leave a comment if the mood strikes you to do so.
And please don't forget to subscribe if you haven't done so already!
It’s been an incredibly hot few weeks here in Europe, and the heat is not very conducive to thinking….or writing
A lot of writers take vacation during the dog days of summer - often recycling old content - I don't think any of us would mind you taking some well deserved time off to recharge ya know!
1. It is abundantly obvious why Macron called the election when he did. He has to have the election before france and various othet American catamites openly and directly intervene in the War Against Russia, lest the election be seen as a referendum on that war.
Anyway, the AfD will be banned. It's only a question of when. Any political force that dares challenge American Hegemony over europe can expect the same, on any pretext.
2. The reason the various alt-conservatives can get along is because they have no power and have no prospects of ever getting power. People less likely ever to get power can scarcely be imagined. (Assuming he is elected, Trump will continue to be weak, stupid and easily manipulated. He will govern like a more dysfunctional Dubya.)
Alt-conservatives are a fringe phenomenon. No significant sector of industry would benefit from their support or needs them. They have no mass constituency. They exist to entertain, misdirect, confuse. They will play no role in the politics of the foreseeable future and don't deserve one.
If he is returned to office Trump may well be effective, but only in relation to fiscal or trade policy. He will be constrained in every other area.
All you need to do is take the average frustrated alt-conservative and try to imagine him (it's almost always a "him") with any kind of influence and authority. The n try not to snicker.
These dweebs make campus Marxists look like hard-headed calculating power brokers by comparison.
The alt-righters I have met are far from masculine. Wannabe masculine, maybe.
All conservatives are a fringe phenomenon. - fixed ir.
"Anyway, the AfD will be banned. It's only a question of when. Any political force that dares challenge American Hegemony over europe can expect the same"
That's way too reductive and misses the German context. It's not only (or even primarily) about geopolitics either, the crucial issue is immigration. Essentially SPD and Greens (and much of CDU/CSU too) have decided on a radical project of societal transformation through mass immigration, and anybody who objects is declared a public enemy. American hegemony only matters to that insofar as similar trends are playing out throughout the West.
"a radical project of societal transformation through mass immigration..."
this must be true because it's verboten to say it.
I suspect that german leaders could toss refugee children alive into piranha tanks and nobody would raise a peep, as long as their knees resolutely hit the floor when an American snapped his fingers.
See, e.g. Nordstream. For that matter. germany is importing tens of thousands of very white and very racist Ukrainian refugees and nobody has a problem.
WRT your second paragraph: That "nobody has a problem" is because those who stay will become the new 'gastarbeiter' (and, hopefully, help with the "Muslim" problem).
Since not many of those Ukrainians are working and their arrival wasn't planned for, a much simpler explanation is that immigration isn't much of a priority for european elites.
Dear FF; Biden is the last American president as the 20th century knew them.
Trump won’t have DC, because DC is dissolving.
Trump may be perhaps the first 18th or 19th century President we’ve had in awhile.
The Democratic Party died Thursday night FF, and DC with it, with that NATO, UN, IMF, all of it…
Wait, wut?
It’s The 🇺🇸 Collapse ™️
So cheer up.
This is what they look like.
DC won’t be coming into the office after the already started long summer vacation.
Lol.
They’ll be remote… and… then…nothing…
Don’t believe me?
Try and get past voice mail.
Or an email response.
In fact little by little the contracted out government, which is all that was actually done for 2-3 decades is.. laid off little by little… and they aren’t replaced.
It’s gone or going…
👋🏻 bye
UST prices show nothing of the sort.
Oh dear. Canned food and shotguns FF.
That’s fiction.
Of course they don’t.
UST = 404
Well, canned cat food and shotgun prices aren't showing anything like what you predict, either.
objectively speaking, chances of an AfD ban are low. first, it's a risky move, unlikely to succeed in the way that they want, and it could fail and make things worse. second, there are many intermediary things they could do that are safer and may even be more effective.
Explain, please.
I've written about this before. Banning the party involves a protracted judicial procedure, which will a) go on for a long time (during which support for AfD will skyrocket), and which b) has high chances of failing. Depending on how heavily infiltrated AfD are by domestic intelligence, a ban might not even be possible: see precedent of NPD. Meanwhile it does nothing about AfD supporters, it will further alienate the new states and split east from west Germany even more. In short, if they wanted to ban AfD, they should've done it before 2015, it's probably too late now.
Intermediary steps are smarter, less drastic, require less protracted procedures, and entail less risk:
1) Cutting the AfD off from their public funding. All parties in Germany receive public funds to campaign for elections and so forth, cutting AfD funding would really hurt them, is easier than an outright ban, less likely to backfire. Chances they do this relatively high.
2) Declaring AfD 'confirmed right-wing extreme' via the BfV. There would be legal challenges, a big fight, but if the cartel parties prevail then AfD lose some important protections, suddenly the 'neutrality' rules that require equal representation in state media are withdrawn, it's easier for the press to smother the party.
3) A state-level ban. This is my bespoke theory but I think they'd try a state-level ban somewhere in the East, maybe as a trial balloon, before trying to ban the party nationally. Thüringen (with the FaSCiSt Björn Höcke) would be the big candidate here. But, this is still risky for the same reasons I outlined in the first paragraph, it's just that the risk is limited.
Interesting. I don't have time to go into it in detail, but the alternatives that you describe are basically banning without using the word "ban".
That said, a lot has changed since the NPD. Hell, since then, following the War On Russia turning hot, Germany has drooped freedom of speech, the press and opinion like they were so many hot turds and nobody raised so much as a peep.
re:Turkey, punditry never mentions that Turkey is in fact sidelined via the new command structure chiefly because of the new Joint Force Command headquartered in Norfolk, VA aka "kinda NATO sort of"
Well. It’s always a big deal in the American Military when Generals wives have to pack teacups and furniture. Moving to Norfolk will save a lot of grief.
We’re coming back home, folks.
Bye 👋🏻
agree.
turkey "importance" because it posses the Bosphorus.... what year is it?
1200 AD?
its relative importance is regional, only for the likes of Ukraine and Georgia.
And good riddance to such a rather unpleasant country like turkey
Its even more important to patrol the Mediterranean with this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Sixth_Fleet
Question for the German friends: does anyone have manufcaturing export numbers and the like post nordstream blow up? And any anecdotal perspective on the current "vibe" in Germany, wrt to the rising rightwing influence and loss of confidence in Brussels?
I would describe the public political 'vibe' in Germany as hysterical and hypermoral. Hating AfD in the open is a continuation of hating Corona measure critics and hating people, who call for peace in Ukraine without being partisan. Sure, there is growing defiance against the government and woke culture, but a reasonable dialog between political opponents is impossible for a long time. For a positive vibe in the right-wing camp it is necessary, that the tensions within the AfD party calm down and that the party stays united. More and more Germans should find their way to alternative media in order to break the spell of mainstream media and shift the Overton window in favour of remigration. It's a metapolitcal struggle while the economy is going south and political repression is rising.
We’ll help.
🇺🇸. We’re leaving.
Is this likely to extend to the continent sized Gibraltar Down Under? Asking for a friend.
My assumption is that the US will keep whatever it can hold onto provided that the cost /benefit ratio is right.
It CANNOT.
Not once DC goes.
Collapse
USA “collapse” ™️ ; the collapse of the Democratic Party, of which Trump is just the Usher IS national institutional collapse outside of business, although Finance is part of the same government party system.
The Democratic Party’s reach and control of all institutions except some businesses and the rank and file police and military, otherwise the Democratic Party IS the National Government.
Yes of course many state and local governments are Republican, but everything National is RINO for a reason, no choice.
The Democratic Party collapsing is the collapse of the ruling party and official religion of government, education, academia, the bureaucracy, many of the Churches Hierarchy, the Intelligence Community, certainly our actual Financial System and decades of relationships centered on the Capitol.
Now as America is an extremely resilient Federated system in every way at every level, we’ll do better than most countries at weathering the storm.
But have no illusions the Collapse of the Democratic Party is collapse of our Public National Institutions.
We’re really going to have to get serious about money.
(I am in no way a Democrat).
I would not be surprised if the collapse functions as a strategic bankruptcy, leaving costs distributed globally with selected jurisdictions within the US relatively unscathed.
Re money, several US states have passed laws enabling the use of precious metals to settle tax liabilities, lifted duties on tbe sale of precious metals and established bullion deposit facilities. The next step is for banks/states to issue fully convertible and negotiable certificates for precious metals. When the dollar goes, life will get Old School very fast indeed.
Edit: Krah has NOT been kicked out of AfD. My apologies.
Mark Lilla's tone is condescending and irritating. Nonetheless the Catholic postliberals like Deneen and Vermeule appear to miss a key point: communitarian politics assumes the existence of communities. This is not necessarily a very sound assumption. In the real world hyperindividualism, atomisation and desocialisation have eradicated communities. Political ideas that are derivatives of nostalgia just don't connect with real world conditions.
As I like to remind the integralist fantasists- "you and what army?"
The Globalists now don’t command the American Military .
It’s there, sure.
So was the ANA (Afghan national army).
This has happened before.
We don’t have universal atomization, I certainly live in a real community. I think most people do still. This may not be evident in certain urban or suburban areas or at certain levels. Nothing is more natural than humans establishing community.
I was generalising about national politics and should have been more careful.
Real communities exist aplenty but they do not generate political force of the kind necessary for national level communitarian politics. The oases of sanity and normality remain but their ability to direct politics or extract concessions from Washington is limited.
It is unclear to me how things will pan out. As the centre weakens the ability of the Feds to impose upon the regions falls. If/when counties, cities and states can shrug off consent decrees that empower the DoJ then communitarian politics becomes substantial.
Perhaps national politics collapses? Then rebuilds?
DC collapses. This I observe.
Every National level figure except Trump and some minor figures is Globalist.
Trump cannot build a movement.
Project 2025 is a good idea far too late.
We don’t need much National government and in any case the concept discredited.
The people most heavily invested in US national government are the governments of Europe and Australasia plus banks the world over.
Having turned the country into an economic zone and a global commons Washington may well try to survive by inviting foreign governments to take over one or other piece of North America. I have no trouble imagining something like the cantonments that the Europeans and Japanese once maintained in China or the foreign concessions in Tangier. It might not be as explicit as that, but there is real potential for that sort of mischief.
I don’t think the competence or staff or will exists. Not in DC
Look all the Liberals and the Progressives have had to do since the 1960s to collapse anything anywhere is be themselves. They crack out (make into slums) anything they touch. Hell I heard off Yale Campus that New Haven Connecticut is a slum.
These are neoliberal vampires who can’t face reality of their situation and convince themselves they’re doing Gods work- decades after defenestrating God. Funny how it was this one little legacy of prayer and service once a week that kept them sane. Well.
Thank you Professor Rawls, that will be all…because you see… Dorian Gray of Plymouth didn’t know about his picture… but he just saw it on the Telly June 27th, 2100 EDT, 0400 GMT June 28th.
That’s it, he’s running..from consequences and from himself.
Nowhere to go.
Antiquity and Absurdity have been invoked and they will answer.
The most competent neoliberal regime on earth is Dubai.
If you don’t know that’s a glittering airport and palaces and a Manhattan skyline in the sand surrounded by cinder block ghettos full of Asian servants it is, go and see. I did. But Emir Ibn al-Vegas 😉 knows WTF he’s doing…
America has done much to weaken itself, just in the last 10 years alone. It saddens heading into July 4 next week, especially for my young children. We all have agency, but state actors are hard to arrest or alter while on their strategic drift.
The one article discussing conservatives’ penchant for nostalgia—sure. But the idea suggested toward the end that Reaganism started us on some YOLO approach to living, and church be damned, is also simplistic. I think it must also be a stealth indictment of the Enlightenment. Yet for a long time before that, we had emperor, king or church, and the modern competitors like the supreme soviet were not great. So I don’t think life under those structures was better—tho I guess serfdom, ignorance, and hunger are clarifying. And, plainly, the wealth we broadly enjoy today only came by unleashing the individual, both in natural and corporate form.
"I think it must also be a stealth indictment of the Enlightenment."
You're saying Lilla is criticizing the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason? How so? I would think he's saying the low-status "far right" types are merely stupid and superstitious, and need re-education, or fed more seduction and persuasion, and if that fails, damned as haters, racists, sexists, homophobes, etc. All abstractions that mean nothing, and which intellectuals love to death.
Yes, Lilla is most Enlightened.
To the point of tenure.
Agreed. You should see his introductory essay to the recent publication of “Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man”. It’s a master class in fundamentally misunderstanding the topic at hand LOL. This article was very much of a piece with the Lilla I know and am mildly bemused by.
In the New America there will be something for everyone and nothing for many.
July the 4th for Britian, Americas Independence Day, that is not by chance it is planned for that date for a reason, I expect many statements to be made in Britain and USSA, all bad.
I predict that Britain will fall into a Civil War during or after the next Global War.
Don’t feel bad. We’re having one shortly too. 🇺🇸
Fantastic piece on the AFD and RN thanks!
We're in for some serious fun over the next little while.
"If RN manages to breach the cordon sanitaire in France, it opens the way for AfD to do the same in Germany"
Given that RN has declared AfD too radical and thrown them out of the ID faction in the EU parliament (which was promptly cited by the German establishment as additional justification for their repression, "AfD is too extreme even for Le Pen"), I don't quite see the logic of that. Franco-German relations are pretty bad now not just on the establishment level, but also between the respective right-wing parties (and let's face it, nationalists are unfortunately frequently too parochial and narrow-minded for successful transnational cooperation, this is a big problem for the European right).
Anyway, Krah's ill-advised comments about the SS (which weren't really wrong though...he didn't deny SS was a criminal organization, he didn't deny the massacres committed by Waffen-SS either, and he didn't bring up the topic in the interview...it was a trap he was foolish enough to walk into) were only a pretext. Something else is going on there. I'm not quite sure what, but Götz Kubitschek (important publisher on the German hard right with close ties to Krah) claims it's about geopolitics, Krah's positive view of the "multipolar world order" and the attempt to establish a pro-American right in Europe (and somewhat surprisingly Kubitschek isn't just critical of the usual suspects like Meloni in this regard, but also of Victor Orban and his CPAC ties):
https://sezession.de/69254/krah-europa-und-ein-deutscher-standpunkt
Again, I'm not sure if Kubitschek is correct about this, and at this stage it may be foolish for AfD anyway to entertain thoughts about influencing geopolitics. There are more immediate matters at home that are more relevant for most voters.
If the RN and AfD were cooperating more closely, then the press would be howling about a unified fascist front.
Any stick to beat a dog.
Tories replaced immigration from Poland with mass immigration from Pakistan. Now the Brits will replace them with Labour who will allow even more mass immigration from the Third World.
Instead of being the Fiji of the North Atlantic the UK prefers to become another Lebanon.
Cannot believe these people ruled half the world just two-three generations ago.
The loss of empire plus the post-war deracination inherent in Americanisation has thoroughly enfeebled and demoralised the British.
Caring about politics in the summer is a Western European kink.
I don't even feel like genociding my second cousins, that's why I was offended by that Crimean beach strike.
Drunk driving should't be a crime when night temperatures stay above 20.
What a comeback!
Thanks Niccolo! A few minor things -
threat of --> threatened with
haven’t been -->hasn’t been [sing. not pl.]
provides them the jet fuel --> provides them with the jet fuel
OR
would provide them with the jet fuel
The details of Turkey's hosting of US nuclear weapons are so fascinating. The stockpile is in Turkey, at a Turkish air base, but under US control.
But... from 2019 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists:
"Of the five nuclear weapons storage locations in Europe, Incirlik Air Base in Turkey stores the most – about 50 or one-third of the weapons in Europe, although there are unconfirmed rumors that the weapons may have been withdrawn."
Ref https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2019.1606503