RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sincerely-emmanuel-11551831254

As political campaign tactics go, we’ve seen better than the open letter that French President Emmanuel Macron sent this week laying out a pan-Europe agenda ahead of May’s European Parliament elections. He manages to combine bad ideas with off-putting self-promotion.

Mr. Macron is trying to rally voters around a centrist, “pro-European” message amid fears that euroskeptic parties could win a third or more of the seats in the next parliament. Violent protests against a fuel-tax hike at home have thwarted Mr. Macron’s effort to build a pan-European political movement, so he’s making do with the letter published in newspapers across the Continent in 22 languages. His platform is “freedom, protection and progress.”

Some ideas are merely impractical. European voters increasingly demand more effective border enforcement, especially after 2015’s migration crisis. Mr. Macron’s call for more stringent border controls around the passport-free European Schengen zone may resonate. But his demand for more burden-sharing in processing asylum claimants will flop. Voters in Poland don’t want to be obliged to house migrants that countries such as Germany or Italy have welcomed or proven powerless to stop.

https://quillette.com/2019/03/04/china-is-gearing-

On February 18, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that a “sophisticated state-actor” had launched a cyber attack on Australia’s major political parties and parliamentary computer system. The Australian government has not yet identified which state-actor is responsible but suspicions almost instantly fell on China. The Chinese military maintains a dedicated unit (the People’s Liberation Army Unit 61398) for cyber attacks. While several other nations maintain the capabilities for this kind of attack, they do not have China’s record of interference in Australian politics. The Chinese Communist Party puts significant resources into neutralizing opposition to its interests within Australian politics and society. Its increasingly flagrant acts of interference prompted the nation to pass sweeping foreign interference laws in 2018.

If China is responsible for the cyber-attack on Australian parliament, it fits a very clear pattern of increasing antagonism by China against the West. This points towards a worrying and unstable future for Western middle-powers with high economic exposure to China. Moreover, China’s increasingly threatening posture suggests that it no longer believes that it can radically reshape the international order without waging a long-term strategic conflict with the West. Until recently, China was careful to maintain the West’s support for the nation’s rise by refraining from activities that would trigger too much anxiety. Not only is China now engaging in these activities with little pretense of restraint (including militarizing the South China Sea) but it has gone one giant leap further by directly threatening the autonomy and stability of Western societies with extensive interference operations.

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/letter-from-brussels-the-belly-of-the-eurobeast/

Visiting Brussels is like visiting an acquaintance who is well informed but whose company you don’t enjoy. It is not fun but it can be useful. The European Union is in a state of latent crisis which has the potential to turn acute at any moment, but the massive bureaucratic machine in its capital pretends it is business as usual. Moscow felt this way in the late 1980’s.

The mandarins at the top are aware that the peasants are restive. Their current line is that the European Union is under threat from “populists,” evil people who first spread and then exploit supposedly irrational phobias on immigration, economy, sovereignty etc. These “far-right, racist nationalists” risk making the EU “ungovernable” if they win big at the European elections in May, but voters may yet turn to them in revolt against the mainstream European politicians, economic commissioner Pierre Moscovici warned a week ago. “Europe is strong but the European idea is under threat,” he said, adding the EU was “threatened by political disagreements between member states on the meaning of the European project.” The challenge, Mr Moscovici said, isn’t’ just to save Europe but to “remake” it: “We need to give the European idea new meaning and ambition . . . There is tension between those who want to continue the European adventure and those who are fighting it, and it’s a frontal battle.”

To refresh my understanding of “the European adventure” as defined by M. Moscovici and his ilk, I walked past the project’s headquarters on Monday morning. There is a strange statue outside the soon-to-be-contested European Parliament. A heroic female figure (supposedly “Europa Goddess,” according to the official EU guidebook) is triumphantly holding high the euro sign; a man and a woman, emerging from the lower folds of her tunic, vainly reach up with their arms. Whatever the meaning of this eerie image, it is unlikely to inspire the masses with “new meaning and ambition.” The statue, albeit on a more modest scale and grimmer in spirit, exudes the temperament of the 1937 “Worker and Kolkhoz Woman” in Moscow. This is unsurprising: the essence of the EU has always been socialist and (velvet) totalitarian.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/03/reflections-on-socialism-and-nationalism/

THE relationship between socialism and nationalism has become a no-go zone for the Left in the West, where it has loudly proclaimed its internationalism, laid out the welcome mat for Third World “refugees” and blamed supposedly impending climate catastrophe on the bad economic choices of fellow citizens, seeking to infuse them with a sense of guilt for their alleged racism, xenophobia and greed. All this at the same time the Left seeks to exploit minority grievances and weaken the bonds of patriotism and identification with the nation state. For those with an hour to spare, this SBS discussion of arranged marriages might serve as a guide to the mainstreaming of ideas and practices once shunned as unacceptable in a former Australia.

In one sense, this might seem to be a reversion to classical revolutionary Marxism, except for the fact that a key element of the dogma, international class struggle, has gone missing. Indeed, in recent years the West’s working class has become decidedly hostile to the leftist programme. Look to Trump’s 2016 presidential victory, Brexit and the ongoing of Yellow Vests protest in France. All this and more has seen the Left in need of an alternative. If the current population refuses to give its consent, then a new population should be imported under the cover of humanitarian blather. Perhaps Bertolt Brecht’s famous poem, The Solution, has a new relevance today:

After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

What all this might indicate is that socialism sans nationalism can only be imposed on advanced Western democracies if a revolutionary elite succeeds with a massive programme of population replacement. Historically, Marxist-Leninist regimes, devoted to international revolution across national borders, had to rely on coercion and terror. Such methods “worked” in Russia and China, neither of which had any developed structure of civil society. Alternatively, such regimes were “occupation regimes”, as in Eastern Europe, imposed by imperial Soviet power.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13826/france-project-transform

“It is up to us to give a political meaning to the [“yellow vest”] revolt. The goal is not simply to challenge an increase in taxes, but the political system that induces it…” — Elias d’Imzalene, French Islamist preacher, November 23, 2018.

“Macron hates the yellow vests and wants them to vanish. He wants to win European elections and needs the Muslim vote. He knows perfectly well who the anti-Semites are today, but will not attack them. He needs them. He attacks [only] those who are dangerous to him. “— Éric Zemmour, French author, February 19, 2019.

Other people noted that holding a demonstration that excluded the right-wing National Rally party was a move aimed at diverting attention from the real anti-Semitic danger. They also suggested that political parties which support the murderers of Jews were precisely those which deny that radical Islam is a danger.

After sixteen Saturday demonstrations by the “yellow vests,” who began in November by protesting French President Emmanuel Macron’s increase in fuel prices, the controversy seems to have taken a darker turn.

That seems to have come to light on February 13, when a small group of demonstrators started hurling insults at a French Jewish philosopher, Alain Finkielkraut — who was born in and lives in Paris — after they spotted him on a sidewalk. One man, shouted, “Shut up, dirty Zionist sh*t,” “Go home to Tel Aviv,” “France is ours,” “God will punish you.” A cameraman filmed the incident, then shared the video on social networks. A scandal ensued. The “yellow vests” movement as a whole was immediately accused by the French government of anti-Semitism and “fascism”.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273039/first-they-came-tommy%E2%80%A6-bruce-bawer

In recent months, even as a majority of the politicians in Britain’s two major parties have seemed to be doing everything they can to cancel or water down the EU exit for which the British people voted, the same establishment has been striving to stifle, and if possible destroy, the man who, more than anyone else in the country, articulates the rage and fear and hope of the British working class – and of no small number of middle-class Brits as well.

For years, British authorities have harassed, threatened, and imprisoned him, their objective plainly being to scare him into silence. Last summer they engineered an unjustified arrest, rushed him through a mockery of a trial, and shipped him off to prison, obviously hoping he wouldn’t come out alive.

Meanwhile, Britain’s mainstream media have demonized him, all of them singing from the same hymnal. Almost invariably, they prefix his name with the words “far-right.” Of course he is far from the only prominent figure in the Western world to be libeled in this way. You can be a liberal in pretty much every way, but if you are so consistent in your liberalism as to be a critic of the appalling illiberalism of Islam, then you are, in the lexicon of the mainstream media, “far-right.”

He’s also routinely identified as the founder of the English Defense League (EDL). Often this is combined with the term “far-right,” as in “founder of the far-right English Defense League” or “far-right founder of the English Defense League.” Very rarely is it mentioned in the mainstream media that he left the EDL years ago precisely because it was turning into a far-right organization and he didn’t want to have anything more to do with it.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/is-realignment-coming-to-british-po

In the U.K., a small group of Labour Members of Parliament joined by an even smaller group of Tory MPs have formed a politically centrist coalition, the Independent Group (TIG). Though the influence of these disgruntled and Europhile MPs is debatable, the fear of more defections may help explain why the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is now backing a second Brexit vote.

But beyond Brexit, it is also possible that TIG will preempt a more significant political realignment. After all, it’s happened before.

In 1981, a group of Labour MPs who were disgruntled by the increasing leftward lurch of their party broke away and formed the Social Democratic party (SDP). The SDP orientated itself as left-of-center, pro-European, and in support of a moderate and mixed economy. In 1983, under the hard-left leadership of Neil Kinnock, the Labour party set out an explicitly socialist party manifesto — in what one Labour MP famously called “the longest suicide note in history.”

That the Labour party’s explicitly socialist policies were unpopular was proven in the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, the year that the Conservatives won with a 43-seat majority — which was the largest electoral swing since 1945. Thatcher’s election in 1979 also began 18 years of uninterrupted Conservative rule — the longest party ruling in British history.

Learning the hard way then, by the mid-’90s, the Labour party reoriented along more centrist lines, and at the 1994 Labour party conference, then leader Tony Blair heralded the arrival of “New Labour.” New Labour rejected socialism, conceded the most popular economic policies of Thatcherism — anti-inflation, low taxation, trade-union reforms, and free-market favorability — and added progressive social values and pro-European and anti-Unionist stances (e.g. devolution for Scotland).

Such a profound change in the party was, naturally, accompanied by a profound change in its base. Under Blair, New Labour consciously ceased to be the party of the working class — as it had been historically — and rather tried to appeal to highly educated, middle-class liberals where it saw its future. But from this, disillusionment with hypocrisy and elitism followed. The working class felt disaffected. Some voted Tory instead.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13827/palestinians-peace-infidels

The ruling by the Palestinian Scholars’ Association is also aimed at sending a message to the US administration that the Palestinians and the Muslims will have nothing to do with the “Deal of the Century.” Moreover, it serves as a reminder that even if some Arabs do sign peace treaties with Israel, there will always be those Muslims who will denounce them as “traitors” and accuse them of acting against the Koran and the rulings of Islam.

Mahmoud Abbas, meanwhile, is acutely aware that Muslims will condemn him — and perhaps issue a fatwa calling for his death — if he ever dares to make peace with the Jews. That suspicion might explain his recent comment during a visit to Egypt, when he was reported to have said that he does not intend to end his life as a traitor by making concessions to Israel

In a recent move, Palestinians have begun resorting to Islam to justify their vehement opposition to normalization of relations with Israel. Palestinian leaders and activists have long cited political and nationalist reasons to explain their opposition to any form of normalization with Israel — but Islam is a new factor in the mix.

The increased talk about the possibility of some Arab countries normalizing their relations with Israel has prompted the Palestinians to wage a campaign aimed at pressuring Arab leaders to refrain from embarking on such a move. The most recent campaign is titled: “Normalization is a Crime.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/03/making

Donald Trump bought a Korean lemon in 2018. Last week, he made some lemonade.

By walking out on his second summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, Trump stepped out of the policy trap that he had entered the previous year. By showing seriousness in a negotiation that seemed likely to continue along the previous three U.S. administrations’ fanciful pattern, Trump lent force to America’s dealings with China as well as others.

Ending the North Korean “denuclearization” charade is honest and sobering. But it does nothing to meet our dire our need for protection against ballistic missiles, including from Korea.

Making nice with Kim at the 2018 Winter Olympics was among the foolish legacies of Trump’s original foreign policy team. With regard to Korea, as with China, Afghanistan, Europe, and everything else, the intellectual horizon of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster was bounded by George W. Bush’s Condoleezza Rice and Barack Obama’s Ben Rhodes. Like their predecessors, Tillerson and McMaster followed “the allies,” and believed in “progress.” Hence, they lent themselves to South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s campaign to use the Seoul Olympics to advance his leftist party’s attempt to legitimize the North Korean regime.

Moon knew that America’s buy-in to that campaign was essential to legitimizing it with South Korean public opinion. Kim, for his part, put on his lugubrious charm. And, for the umpteenth time since his father started building nukes and missiles three decades ago, Kim offered to give them all up. This time, for sure!