I've been ranting about the American capture of the European decision making class for quite some time. At this point in European history all the (future) rewards for the people in power come from Washington and as such they have no real incentive to stand up for European interests.
I'd like to add the way US journalism has captured Europe. In the olden days (yes, I am that old) journalists often started out as paperboys working their way up the media hierarchy. I grudgingly admired those people even though they were often deeply cynical b"stards - I guess seeing the dark side of the world inevitably does that to a person.
Today all of Europe's media is staffed by college educated people who have all learned to think and report the exact same way - the American way. A worrying number of Europe's top writers are members of the Transatlantic network institutions. Consequently all reporting is interchangeable - one size fits all.
What really irks me is how this has resulted in the practice that reports from 'trusted' American resources are no longer fact checked by any European legacy media - even it it is obvious nonsense. Just copy, paste and publish. This has been a major cause for the current media distrust.
Culture is a living, breathing and evolving entity. If you don't feed it and nurture it in a healthy and loving way it will get sick and wither away. Unquestionably transplanting Americanism in its many forms to the Europe body has led to bad health outcomes.
Still I see some signs that the immune system of the European body has finally kicked in. But this will take time and a healthy outcome is not guaranteed.
Note that the european fears more than anything that Master will leave him,nhe can't live without Master, doesn't want to live without Master, can't even imagine life without Master.
Very good Aurelian. The US has taken over the thinking of the entire Western world via the Mighty Wurlitzer and it seems the ruling elites have been taken in totally. It is not that the ideas are great or even that they have stood the test of time, or even work, they are just endlessly shoved down people's throats and resistance is futile. The glib confidence of the American bullshit artists disconcerts reasonable people who have doubts but they are swept along nevertheless, overwhelmed by the gullible.
The globalisation agenda, built on the destruction of the western working class by Thatcher and Reagan has been a massive driver of this dystopia. The US no longer makes anything useful, having sent all manufacturing to China and are now resentful that China has done something useful with this inadvertent largesse. They were supposed to be just another shithole with cheap labour, but the fact that they are not has led the US elites to lose their senses.
Meanwhile the western working class have realised that they have been screwed and that the PMC have very little interest in sorting this out. It's about to get ugly.
When the Americans complained that when they wanted to call Europe they had no-one to call, (a total misunderstanding of Europe in itself), but who would ever imagined that the person to call would ever have been Ursula van der Leyen or Mark Rutte
I agree Chris, I made similar points in my recent article on consumer-communism here on Substack, comments welcome.
Trans-ideological corporations have formed strategic alliances with Chinese manufacturing which are more powerful than Western nation-states. For example, the US government passed the CHIPS Act to re-shore semiconductor production. The Biden administration's response included subsidising Tawanese giant TSMC with a reported $6.6 billion grant to open chip factories in Arizona. In what sense are those factories 'American' or 'capitalist', other than being located in a theoretically capitalist America? Masochism indeed.
The beauty of the solution the Americans found is that now they don't have to call. Uschi and Mark call them to ask how high a cliff they should push the unwilling lemmings (us) off from.
I laughed and laughed, cringed and laughed some more, cringed again then couldn't laugh any more.
You've exactly described the political system and elites in my own country, which should be about as far away from this as we are physically and temporally.
I'll add my own minor addendum to this discussion of European avoidance of their own history. My software-engineer adult son brought his retired father on a two-week visit to Vienna, Austria a couple of months ago, and we both did the tourist thing, as well as the more mundane chore of walking around the city neighborhood of our downscale hotel.
So, now and then, I fell into conversation with people who happened to be there on the sidewalk.
On one occasion I asked a group -- four or five young adults (in their 20s) -- how it is that there's no monument, or street or plaza, named in honor of Clemens von Metternich, the longtime chancellor of the Austrian Empire when it was at its height of power and influence in early 19th-century Europe.
None had given the idea any thought. When I pointed out, that I could hardly go to Berlin and find not a single monument to Otto von Bismarck, they fell completely silent.
The history of Austrian power and influence did not exist for them.
As a tourist in Vienna last spring I was struck immediately by the nakedly imperial character of its old architecture -- it seems strange to me that its inhabitants aren't aware of that, but perhaps they don't find it remarkable in any way because they don't know anything different?
However it leaves out some important issues, here are two.
Financially , after WW2 , the US developed global mechanisms to enslave the world. they still exist and are proving difficult to remove even through concerted effort from China/Russia. And the US is trying to enlarge this to cover every fx transaction.
In the vacuum of responsible, intelligent politicians steps forward evil. Personified by the likes of Blinken in the US , I could give other examples I think we all could. Without any counterbalance this evil develops and affects everything.
I certainly don't underestimate the importance of economic issues, and mention them in the essay: the economics of the entertainment industry, for example. But history shows that money, and even economic power, by itself is largely meaningless, unless you can buy actual power with it. Since most of the US economy consists of imaginary valuations of imaginary things, I don't really think it's that much of a threat. I agree, though, that the perception of US economic power, no matter how misguided, is a factor.
The infiltration of US ‘culture’ started much earlier than you believe. My recollection of when I was growing up in the fifties, in a quite remote part of Scotland, is that even then childrens culture was saturated by US comic strip cowboy books, featuring the likes of Tom Mix, Roy Rodgers and even, I remember, a character called ‘Lash LaRue’, (who was not, as you might suspect, a BDSM specialist, but a cowboy who used his whip to defeat gunmen. Perhaps the writer, whoever he was, was having a little ‘in’ joke to himself). There were other strip comics such as ‘Archie Andrews’ (with Veronica, Betty and Jughead), and ’Superman’ and ‘Batman’. TV had the ‘Lone Ranger’, ‘Dragnet’ and later, ‘Wagon Train’. Half my toys too were assorted ‘six-guns’, Winchester rifles etc. and every child had a pair of jeans and a ‘cowboy’ hat.
The Korean war was then relatively recent and the US were portrayed as ‘the good guys’ there. Musically, my parents had a collection of country and western 45’s by Jim Reeves and Slim Whitman. Books by US novelists such as Ernest K. Gann, Hemingway and so on were commonplace. Promotion of US ‘culture’ was everywhere, it was the new ‘workshop of the world’, and it took me a while to realise what had really happened to the Native Americans.
I suppose you’re right though - by the sixties the gloss had started to wear off. By the time of the Cuban missile crisis I recall that I wanted the Russians to come out of it best.
As for the rest, while I have no argument with the general thrust of the article, again I, as usual, have to disagree with your lack of aportioning blame. There is an implicit story that the US or the EU are just innocents, blundering through the world, meaning well, but only accidently causing harm, no malice aforethought. I disagree. There are plenty of actors with much malice aforethought, like Madeliene Albright and Hillary Clinton and Tony Blair and Joe Biden, and numerous un-named minions of the US/UK/EU war industries, both within and without government.
Finally, “[Europe] - Rather than proclaiming its status as then only continent that never had slavery . . .” - really, to make a distinction between ‘not having slavery’ and ‘profiting massively from slavery’ is a distinction too far for me, and I suspect, many others. It is also factually wrong, as both Ancient Greece and Rome had massive amounts of slaves, and as far as I can tell they were in ‘Europe’ at the time.
Oh, I grew up in the same era and saw the same things, and I agree that the infiltration began much earlier: George Orwell wrote about it in the 1940s, I think. But I'm concerned with the effect on European political culture and ways of thinking, which is a lot more recent.
I'm not apportioning blame, and I do wish people would stop making excluded-middle interpretations here. Whatever Europe and the US are, they are not innocent, and they are not necessarily well-meaning. They are just less clever and devious than a lot of local actors who play the game better.
As regards slavery, I wasn't making a polemical point (and of course I was talking abut modern Europe. yes.) See any standard history of the subject. Individuals in the past became rich from slavery-adjacent enterprises, but that wasn't my point. I expressed surprise that in dealing with other countries Europe does not draw upon its historical achievements in creating better societies, but talks in terms of bloodless norms instead. You can't both try to be an example to others and hatebyour own history at the same time.
Thank you for pointing out the "slavery" bit. Columbus's first act on arriving to American shores was capturing a couple of natives to present at the Spanish court. At the time there were some fairly active slave markets in both Portugal and Spain. Slavery was (technically) reserved for people who had been captured in battle and who weren't members of the Catholic Church, but that doesn't mean that it didn't exist. A very interesting book delving into what happened to the people captured during the columbian exchange is "On Savage Shores" by Caroline Dodds Pennock. The book has its faults, but it does delve into what actually happened to all of the indigenous people that were taken to europe after the Columbian exchange.
"Rather than proclaiming its status as then only continent that never had slavery, and actively worked to end it elsewhere,.."
Another insightful article, but I'm a little confused about this statement
"Rather than proclaiming its status as then only continent that never had slavery, and actively worked to end it elsewhere, "
That's just not true. There's books written about European slavery. Are not Italy, Greece and Scandinavia part of Europe? They were all slave societies. And slavery did not end with Christianity. That is a myth. I read an excellent and long overdue book a few years ago that provides much evidence of European Christians selling their people into slavery and the church knew about it and even assisted and profited selling European Christians to Muslim societies.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
*The Forgotten Slave Trade: The White European Slaves of Islam*
~
Pen and Sword History, 2021
Simon Webb
~
description
"Explains the role of the newly independent United States in putting an end to the trade in European and American slaves.
Everybody knows about the transatlantic slave trade, which saw black Africans snatched from their homes, taken across the Atlantic Ocean and then sold into slavery. However, a century before Britain became involved in this terrible business, whole villages and towns in England, Ireland, Italy, Spain and other European countries were being depopulated by slavers, who transported the men, women and children to Africa where they were sold to the highest bidder. This is the forgotten slave trade; one which saw over a million Christians forced into captivity in the Muslim world.
Starting with the practice of slavery in the ancient world, Simon Webb traces the history of slavery in Europe, showing that the numbers involved were vast and that the victims were often treated far more cruelly than black slaves in America and the Caribbean. Castration, used very occasionally against black slaves taken across the Atlantic, was routinely carried out on an industrial scale on European boys who were exported to Africa and the Middle East. Most people are aware that the English city of Bristol was a major center for the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century, but hardly anyone knows that 1,000 years earlier it had been an important staging-post for the
Reading this book will forever change how you view the slave trade and show that many commonly held beliefs about this controversial subject are almost wholly inaccurate and mistaken.
"By contrast, this was at the end of the “thirty glorious years” when Europe had known strong growth, social harmony and equality, and international peace, giving European leaders a confidence that they have since completely lost."
Honestly, I am kind of surprised you wrote this. During the "thirty glorious years" there was enormous levels of political violence in Europe. Whether the OAS fighting the French State in the early 60s, the "Years of Lead" in Italy, communist terrorists in West Germany, the Troubles in the late 60s throughout the 70s, or even the Mai '68 riots by ungrateful students in Paris and elsewhere.
Well, put it this way. You have a choice between Europe 1914-45 and Europe 1945-75. Which would you take? It wasn't just that the political situation was calmer, it was also economic prosperity and a better society. Nobody ever said that era was perfect.
Aurelian, in the context of the paragraph this quote comes from you are not talking about comparing the "Thirty Glorious Years" to the thirty years that preceded it but rather as a comparison to the United States. It is a dangerous game to look back on the past with nostalgia.
The "Thirty Glorious Years" saw enormous social upheaval in a Europe exhausted by the previous thirty years. Hence why European upheaval did not have global ramifications.
It is also an upheaval that saw a general improvement in living standards driven by technological improvements, a lack of hyper competition from countries like Japan (from the late 1970s onwards) and China (something only from the last ~25 years), low energy prices which ended with OPEC's retaliation to Israel winning the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and positive demographics with the baby boomers coming of age.
What I want to emphasise is that we ought not to pretend the past was perfect because we are unhappy with the present. That is why Europe has not progressed because leaders and the general public is always looking in the rear-view mirror.
That wasn't how I intended it to read. I was specifically thinking about the 194-75 period, and how it felt to live through (most of) it. What distinguished that period (and this is an argument I have had with John Michael Greer on his Ecosophia blog a number of times) was not technological progress, but political will. The great advances were essentially political: decent housing, full employment, attacks on poverty, free and universal health care, high progressive rates of income tax and more social equality. What enabled me to have ten years' more education than my parents was not some wonderful technology, but simple political will. We could have those things now if the will existed. And whilst nostalgia is often misguided, so is the automatic reaction that things must necessarily get better all the time. As an extreme case, no-one would accuse a German in 1937 of nostalgia for looking back a decade and thinking things were better. I'm not sure we have progressed in any positive way since those days, beyond some examples of what I would regard as a natural set of developments arising from such things as widespread education. I remain to be convinced.
On the bright side: the younger elite generation (the ones who are in uni and actually acquire knowledge, such as math students or physics students) are turning their backs on Hollywood and modern music and are enjoying older movies from the sixties, and older pop music. They are not particularly interested in politics, so no firm convictions either way, but I think it's a start...
I am always torn when I read your articles. On the one hand you usually make some pretty good points. On the other hand, you often fail to see the elephant in the room.
In this particular instance, everything becomes much clearer if one considers where (nowadays, at least) the real power resides, which is the big money. The neoliberal wave since the 1980s, which originated in the US, had two major effects: it made the richest 0.1% even richer than everyone else; at the same time, it expanded the influence of this (money) elite over the whole world, with large corporations evolving from national champions to global players.
I think you are mistaken to dismiss US power. Yes, it is declining, but it is still by far the greatest in the world. This is notwithstanding the erosion of its material and social underpinnings that's been going on over the last few decades. Because this power is basically financial. This can be readily seen when you look at the world-wide impact of organizations sponsored by US oligarchs, whether it's Open Society Foundation, Gates Foundation, Rockefellers, etc etc. (Did you hear them cry "foul" when nations such as Georgia pass "foreign agent" laws intended to make the influence of such organizations at least transparent? The US know exactly what this is all about, they were the first to pass such a law, many decades ago.)
One well-known gateway is to shape and influence efforts at harmonization and standardization between nations (e.g. in areas such as health care or education), which I believe were mostly initiated with good intentions. Practically all of them have deteriorated into an especially evil form of "public private partnership", where big money provides some initial funding, sets the agenda, and reaps all the profits, while national governments pay the bulk of the costs and "sell" it to their people (if these issues are publicly discussed at all, preferably not).
Another important tool is the "americanization" of (not only our) culture, which has to a large extent been money-driven. It's purpose is to shape the social battlefield for take-over, by associating US paradigms (i.e. the neoliberal agenda) with the things that especially young people find hip. The next step is to build "national" social and political organizations that are actually financed and controlled by US government and big money. These organizations then penetrate political parties, grooming, featuring, and generously supporting suitable candidates for political careers, giving them a competitive advantage in the party-internal struggle for power. (I think "networking" is the modern euphemism for that.) This is how the likes of Baerbock, Macron, von der Leyen, and Trudeau came to power. It is certainly not masochism that drives these people, they personally profit considerably from it. For them, kissing up to US dominance and adhering to the mainstream agenda is just the price to be payed for success and the feeling of being important. Yes, it may require suppressing the occasional doubts about whether all this is really in the interest of their people; I guess this is a matter of selecting the "right" sort of people for these jobs.
It works similarly in other important areas, like the mass media and universities.
With billions of dollars to spare (because you own hundreds of them), an army of highly payed professionals to execute, and enough time, you can politically capture (i.e. corrupt) the elites of any nation, especially if it is (relatively) poor. Only those who shield their information space rigorously and very early in the process can withstand it. Of course countries can liberate themselves from this sort of domination by popular revolt against the incumbent elites, and much of the political crisis we see in Europe is a struggle to achieve exactly that, i.e. regain some sort of sovereignty.
I always see one main intention in Aurelien essays: he try to balance some reductionist explanations. By doing so, obviously, you always tend to be reductive in some way, but it is unavoidable. For transmit an idea for approaching reality you have to simplify it and let other things: that's how knowledge works. And then, another person like you come and give new and complementary information (or refutation even) making our knowledge better.
The reductionisms that Aurelien attack are the ones that simplify any political event like an effect of actions of strategic actors (or big potencies). He has pointed it many times, and he has make the good point that we must understand the main paper that regional powers have using this big players, not being only puppets. Also, he shows knowledge of sociology, because he explain why the States behave by "ad intra" factors. The endogamy of elites (cohabitation of plural cultural, political and economical groups) based one sharing one "cosmovision" about the world affects the values, the identity and the actions of the State. In this article, for example, following Brzezinski, he point well that it is easy for European leaders to clean their hands, neither by submission or by blaming; if you think, this is an easy electoral strategy because you don't have to show success. This, for example, could be explained by our knowledge of how institutions and democracies works, falling in an electoralism that only thinks in the short-term
His comment could be improved by your point. That process of cultural "americanisation" could be explained by economical reasons in a good portion; or the behave of a lot of cultural elites could be explained by transformation of communications with internet ant their need to be rescued (by big companies or by the States), affecting their partiality, or just fighting for attention diminishing the quality of the publications. The same goes to universities: a economical logic has affected it. Respecting economical powers, it is true that when their jump to "fiscal paradises" that are mainly American or British, their interests changes and "go away" from their respective countries. It is right also that NSA can pressure
some politicians and that "revolving doors" exists. We can see all the Green Policies as a mix of ideology, cultural endogamy and economical interests,¡.
However, we must understand that the behaviour of every person is a mix of multiple things to avoid and others to achieve, an that includes material interests, but also having the approbation of their peers, not loosing a job or simply felt well with himself, and that needs to avoid cognitive dissonance and to justify in a narrative way their behaviour. Cultural aspects, psychological, political and economical are mixed. That is, I think, what Aurelien wants to transmit in order to avoid excessive simplifications.
An excellent description of the "comprador elites" that the US has spawned around the world since the advent of Bretton Woods. To your list of agencies complicit in this process I would add the NED and USAID ...
"Ultimately, for this generation of incapable politicians and their parasites, it’s more acceptable to be thought to be creatures of a foreign power than it is to stand up and take responsibility for your own actions. A Big Boy did it and ran away."
Ever since 1945, europeans have discovered that the like being slaves, that they need to be slaves, the way a dog needs a Master. Some minor American functionary snaps his fingers and european knees hit the floor with a resolute thud, eyes glittering with delight, grateful for the opportunity to servie Master.
Just that europeans also think way too highly of themselves, so they see an American Master as preferable to a Russian master, or, God forbid, an Asian Master.
"...almost total alienation of ordinary people from European political systems..."
That's right. And none of the intelligentsia are doing anything or even suggesting anything or even calling for, looking for anyone who might do anything to fix that.
Even here, see? Excellent article culminating in that truth and leaving it there.
Here's what I reckon would be a good starting point to aim for. An app. What's more contemporary than an app. Here's one that could change every thing.
I believe that the comment about European slavery was a British-ism.
In the early 1800s, Britain unilaterally declared the intercontinental slave trade to be illegal, and used the Royal Navy to suppress it. Britain also declared slavery illegal at home. This is always mentioned with high-minded comments about the moral superiority of John Bull Drummond.
I have an alternate, more practical explanation: slavery is most effective in tropical climates, and slowly loses effectiveness as you travel to the poles. Britain's colonial competitors all had their colonies in the tropics; Britain had tropical colonies also but most of the major ones were in temperate zones and the sub-arctic. The Caribbean tropical colonies depended on slaves imported from Africa. Aristocrats in the home countries controlled this trade by royal monopolies, and took a cut. By cutting off slave exports to tropical colonies, Britain forced French, Dutch, and Spanish colonies to switch to locally bred slaves, which created local middle class slave managers, which weakened the home country slave-owning aristocrats and created notions of independence in the colonies.
Cutting off this slave export/import trade was a brilliant strategic move in the great power competition of the colonial powers. Britain forced its colonial rivals to suffer political unrest in the colonies, to the level that Britain already suffered.
More on industrial slavery and geography: slaves don't like being slaves and they try to escape. In the tropics, plantations need a lot of slaves in a small area, so it is possible to afford enough thugs to keep the slaves in place. In temperate climes, one must exploit more and more land to support one plantation family, and slavery falls short. In sub-Arctic areas, it completely fails. Canada (I think) never had industrial slavery.
Excellent article -
I've been ranting about the American capture of the European decision making class for quite some time. At this point in European history all the (future) rewards for the people in power come from Washington and as such they have no real incentive to stand up for European interests.
I'd like to add the way US journalism has captured Europe. In the olden days (yes, I am that old) journalists often started out as paperboys working their way up the media hierarchy. I grudgingly admired those people even though they were often deeply cynical b"stards - I guess seeing the dark side of the world inevitably does that to a person.
Today all of Europe's media is staffed by college educated people who have all learned to think and report the exact same way - the American way. A worrying number of Europe's top writers are members of the Transatlantic network institutions. Consequently all reporting is interchangeable - one size fits all.
What really irks me is how this has resulted in the practice that reports from 'trusted' American resources are no longer fact checked by any European legacy media - even it it is obvious nonsense. Just copy, paste and publish. This has been a major cause for the current media distrust.
Culture is a living, breathing and evolving entity. If you don't feed it and nurture it in a healthy and loving way it will get sick and wither away. Unquestionably transplanting Americanism in its many forms to the Europe body has led to bad health outcomes.
Still I see some signs that the immune system of the European body has finally kicked in. But this will take time and a healthy outcome is not guaranteed.
Note that the european fears more than anything that Master will leave him,nhe can't live without Master, doesn't want to live without Master, can't even imagine life without Master.
Indeed but which countries in Europe are going to fork out on 5% defence spending?
All they want is for Master not to leave them, and 5% defense spending isn't really a condition for that.
Well if the Master did.
The Russian tanks would be rolling over the central European again. Circa 1943-45.
I for one would welcome our new overlords.
This isn't Risk!
Very good Aurelian. The US has taken over the thinking of the entire Western world via the Mighty Wurlitzer and it seems the ruling elites have been taken in totally. It is not that the ideas are great or even that they have stood the test of time, or even work, they are just endlessly shoved down people's throats and resistance is futile. The glib confidence of the American bullshit artists disconcerts reasonable people who have doubts but they are swept along nevertheless, overwhelmed by the gullible.
The globalisation agenda, built on the destruction of the western working class by Thatcher and Reagan has been a massive driver of this dystopia. The US no longer makes anything useful, having sent all manufacturing to China and are now resentful that China has done something useful with this inadvertent largesse. They were supposed to be just another shithole with cheap labour, but the fact that they are not has led the US elites to lose their senses.
Meanwhile the western working class have realised that they have been screwed and that the PMC have very little interest in sorting this out. It's about to get ugly.
When the Americans complained that when they wanted to call Europe they had no-one to call, (a total misunderstanding of Europe in itself), but who would ever imagined that the person to call would ever have been Ursula van der Leyen or Mark Rutte
I agree Chris, I made similar points in my recent article on consumer-communism here on Substack, comments welcome.
Trans-ideological corporations have formed strategic alliances with Chinese manufacturing which are more powerful than Western nation-states. For example, the US government passed the CHIPS Act to re-shore semiconductor production. The Biden administration's response included subsidising Tawanese giant TSMC with a reported $6.6 billion grant to open chip factories in Arizona. In what sense are those factories 'American' or 'capitalist', other than being located in a theoretically capitalist America? Masochism indeed.
The beauty of the solution the Americans found is that now they don't have to call. Uschi and Mark call them to ask how high a cliff they should push the unwilling lemmings (us) off from.
"A Big Boy did it and ran away."
I laughed and laughed, cringed and laughed some more, cringed again then couldn't laugh any more.
You've exactly described the political system and elites in my own country, which should be about as far away from this as we are physically and temporally.
plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
(The country is Straya, if anyone is wondering)
I'll add my own minor addendum to this discussion of European avoidance of their own history. My software-engineer adult son brought his retired father on a two-week visit to Vienna, Austria a couple of months ago, and we both did the tourist thing, as well as the more mundane chore of walking around the city neighborhood of our downscale hotel.
So, now and then, I fell into conversation with people who happened to be there on the sidewalk.
On one occasion I asked a group -- four or five young adults (in their 20s) -- how it is that there's no monument, or street or plaza, named in honor of Clemens von Metternich, the longtime chancellor of the Austrian Empire when it was at its height of power and influence in early 19th-century Europe.
None had given the idea any thought. When I pointed out, that I could hardly go to Berlin and find not a single monument to Otto von Bismarck, they fell completely silent.
The history of Austrian power and influence did not exist for them.
As a tourist in Vienna last spring I was struck immediately by the nakedly imperial character of its old architecture -- it seems strange to me that its inhabitants aren't aware of that, but perhaps they don't find it remarkable in any way because they don't know anything different?
A lot to agree with.
However it leaves out some important issues, here are two.
Financially , after WW2 , the US developed global mechanisms to enslave the world. they still exist and are proving difficult to remove even through concerted effort from China/Russia. And the US is trying to enlarge this to cover every fx transaction.
In the vacuum of responsible, intelligent politicians steps forward evil. Personified by the likes of Blinken in the US , I could give other examples I think we all could. Without any counterbalance this evil develops and affects everything.
I certainly don't underestimate the importance of economic issues, and mention them in the essay: the economics of the entertainment industry, for example. But history shows that money, and even economic power, by itself is largely meaningless, unless you can buy actual power with it. Since most of the US economy consists of imaginary valuations of imaginary things, I don't really think it's that much of a threat. I agree, though, that the perception of US economic power, no matter how misguided, is a factor.
Another good essay with much to chew over.
The infiltration of US ‘culture’ started much earlier than you believe. My recollection of when I was growing up in the fifties, in a quite remote part of Scotland, is that even then childrens culture was saturated by US comic strip cowboy books, featuring the likes of Tom Mix, Roy Rodgers and even, I remember, a character called ‘Lash LaRue’, (who was not, as you might suspect, a BDSM specialist, but a cowboy who used his whip to defeat gunmen. Perhaps the writer, whoever he was, was having a little ‘in’ joke to himself). There were other strip comics such as ‘Archie Andrews’ (with Veronica, Betty and Jughead), and ’Superman’ and ‘Batman’. TV had the ‘Lone Ranger’, ‘Dragnet’ and later, ‘Wagon Train’. Half my toys too were assorted ‘six-guns’, Winchester rifles etc. and every child had a pair of jeans and a ‘cowboy’ hat.
The Korean war was then relatively recent and the US were portrayed as ‘the good guys’ there. Musically, my parents had a collection of country and western 45’s by Jim Reeves and Slim Whitman. Books by US novelists such as Ernest K. Gann, Hemingway and so on were commonplace. Promotion of US ‘culture’ was everywhere, it was the new ‘workshop of the world’, and it took me a while to realise what had really happened to the Native Americans.
I suppose you’re right though - by the sixties the gloss had started to wear off. By the time of the Cuban missile crisis I recall that I wanted the Russians to come out of it best.
As for the rest, while I have no argument with the general thrust of the article, again I, as usual, have to disagree with your lack of aportioning blame. There is an implicit story that the US or the EU are just innocents, blundering through the world, meaning well, but only accidently causing harm, no malice aforethought. I disagree. There are plenty of actors with much malice aforethought, like Madeliene Albright and Hillary Clinton and Tony Blair and Joe Biden, and numerous un-named minions of the US/UK/EU war industries, both within and without government.
Finally, “[Europe] - Rather than proclaiming its status as then only continent that never had slavery . . .” - really, to make a distinction between ‘not having slavery’ and ‘profiting massively from slavery’ is a distinction too far for me, and I suspect, many others. It is also factually wrong, as both Ancient Greece and Rome had massive amounts of slaves, and as far as I can tell they were in ‘Europe’ at the time.
Oh, I grew up in the same era and saw the same things, and I agree that the infiltration began much earlier: George Orwell wrote about it in the 1940s, I think. But I'm concerned with the effect on European political culture and ways of thinking, which is a lot more recent.
I'm not apportioning blame, and I do wish people would stop making excluded-middle interpretations here. Whatever Europe and the US are, they are not innocent, and they are not necessarily well-meaning. They are just less clever and devious than a lot of local actors who play the game better.
As regards slavery, I wasn't making a polemical point (and of course I was talking abut modern Europe. yes.) See any standard history of the subject. Individuals in the past became rich from slavery-adjacent enterprises, but that wasn't my point. I expressed surprise that in dealing with other countries Europe does not draw upon its historical achievements in creating better societies, but talks in terms of bloodless norms instead. You can't both try to be an example to others and hatebyour own history at the same time.
OK, fair enough.
Thank you for pointing out the "slavery" bit. Columbus's first act on arriving to American shores was capturing a couple of natives to present at the Spanish court. At the time there were some fairly active slave markets in both Portugal and Spain. Slavery was (technically) reserved for people who had been captured in battle and who weren't members of the Catholic Church, but that doesn't mean that it didn't exist. A very interesting book delving into what happened to the people captured during the columbian exchange is "On Savage Shores" by Caroline Dodds Pennock. The book has its faults, but it does delve into what actually happened to all of the indigenous people that were taken to europe after the Columbian exchange.
I also found that statement about an historic absence of slavery in Europe simply bizarre.
"Rather than proclaiming its status as then only continent that never had slavery, and actively worked to end it elsewhere,.."
Another insightful article, but I'm a little confused about this statement
"Rather than proclaiming its status as then only continent that never had slavery, and actively worked to end it elsewhere, "
That's just not true. There's books written about European slavery. Are not Italy, Greece and Scandinavia part of Europe? They were all slave societies. And slavery did not end with Christianity. That is a myth. I read an excellent and long overdue book a few years ago that provides much evidence of European Christians selling their people into slavery and the church knew about it and even assisted and profited selling European Christians to Muslim societies.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
*The Forgotten Slave Trade: The White European Slaves of Islam*
~
Pen and Sword History, 2021
Simon Webb
~
description
"Explains the role of the newly independent United States in putting an end to the trade in European and American slaves.
Everybody knows about the transatlantic slave trade, which saw black Africans snatched from their homes, taken across the Atlantic Ocean and then sold into slavery. However, a century before Britain became involved in this terrible business, whole villages and towns in England, Ireland, Italy, Spain and other European countries were being depopulated by slavers, who transported the men, women and children to Africa where they were sold to the highest bidder. This is the forgotten slave trade; one which saw over a million Christians forced into captivity in the Muslim world.
Starting with the practice of slavery in the ancient world, Simon Webb traces the history of slavery in Europe, showing that the numbers involved were vast and that the victims were often treated far more cruelly than black slaves in America and the Caribbean. Castration, used very occasionally against black slaves taken across the Atlantic, was routinely carried out on an industrial scale on European boys who were exported to Africa and the Middle East. Most people are aware that the English city of Bristol was a major center for the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century, but hardly anyone knows that 1,000 years earlier it had been an important staging-post for the
transfer of English slaves to Africa.
https://annas-archive.org/md5/d764b653d356a88d44897979ad0b92b9
Reading this book will forever change how you view the slave trade and show that many commonly held beliefs about this controversial subject are almost wholly inaccurate and mistaken.
Not to mention the origin of the term "Slavic" peoples ...
"By contrast, this was at the end of the “thirty glorious years” when Europe had known strong growth, social harmony and equality, and international peace, giving European leaders a confidence that they have since completely lost."
Honestly, I am kind of surprised you wrote this. During the "thirty glorious years" there was enormous levels of political violence in Europe. Whether the OAS fighting the French State in the early 60s, the "Years of Lead" in Italy, communist terrorists in West Germany, the Troubles in the late 60s throughout the 70s, or even the Mai '68 riots by ungrateful students in Paris and elsewhere.
Hardly a wonderful example of social harmony!
Well, put it this way. You have a choice between Europe 1914-45 and Europe 1945-75. Which would you take? It wasn't just that the political situation was calmer, it was also economic prosperity and a better society. Nobody ever said that era was perfect.
Aurelian, in the context of the paragraph this quote comes from you are not talking about comparing the "Thirty Glorious Years" to the thirty years that preceded it but rather as a comparison to the United States. It is a dangerous game to look back on the past with nostalgia.
The "Thirty Glorious Years" saw enormous social upheaval in a Europe exhausted by the previous thirty years. Hence why European upheaval did not have global ramifications.
It is also an upheaval that saw a general improvement in living standards driven by technological improvements, a lack of hyper competition from countries like Japan (from the late 1970s onwards) and China (something only from the last ~25 years), low energy prices which ended with OPEC's retaliation to Israel winning the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and positive demographics with the baby boomers coming of age.
What I want to emphasise is that we ought not to pretend the past was perfect because we are unhappy with the present. That is why Europe has not progressed because leaders and the general public is always looking in the rear-view mirror.
That wasn't how I intended it to read. I was specifically thinking about the 194-75 period, and how it felt to live through (most of) it. What distinguished that period (and this is an argument I have had with John Michael Greer on his Ecosophia blog a number of times) was not technological progress, but political will. The great advances were essentially political: decent housing, full employment, attacks on poverty, free and universal health care, high progressive rates of income tax and more social equality. What enabled me to have ten years' more education than my parents was not some wonderful technology, but simple political will. We could have those things now if the will existed. And whilst nostalgia is often misguided, so is the automatic reaction that things must necessarily get better all the time. As an extreme case, no-one would accuse a German in 1937 of nostalgia for looking back a decade and thinking things were better. I'm not sure we have progressed in any positive way since those days, beyond some examples of what I would regard as a natural set of developments arising from such things as widespread education. I remain to be convinced.
Just briliant! Can't thank you enough for putting in writing exactly my thoughts and feelings in such a precise and grand way. Thank you!
On the bright side: the younger elite generation (the ones who are in uni and actually acquire knowledge, such as math students or physics students) are turning their backs on Hollywood and modern music and are enjoying older movies from the sixties, and older pop music. They are not particularly interested in politics, so no firm convictions either way, but I think it's a start...
Fiddling while everything increasingly burns.
I am always torn when I read your articles. On the one hand you usually make some pretty good points. On the other hand, you often fail to see the elephant in the room.
In this particular instance, everything becomes much clearer if one considers where (nowadays, at least) the real power resides, which is the big money. The neoliberal wave since the 1980s, which originated in the US, had two major effects: it made the richest 0.1% even richer than everyone else; at the same time, it expanded the influence of this (money) elite over the whole world, with large corporations evolving from national champions to global players.
I think you are mistaken to dismiss US power. Yes, it is declining, but it is still by far the greatest in the world. This is notwithstanding the erosion of its material and social underpinnings that's been going on over the last few decades. Because this power is basically financial. This can be readily seen when you look at the world-wide impact of organizations sponsored by US oligarchs, whether it's Open Society Foundation, Gates Foundation, Rockefellers, etc etc. (Did you hear them cry "foul" when nations such as Georgia pass "foreign agent" laws intended to make the influence of such organizations at least transparent? The US know exactly what this is all about, they were the first to pass such a law, many decades ago.)
One well-known gateway is to shape and influence efforts at harmonization and standardization between nations (e.g. in areas such as health care or education), which I believe were mostly initiated with good intentions. Practically all of them have deteriorated into an especially evil form of "public private partnership", where big money provides some initial funding, sets the agenda, and reaps all the profits, while national governments pay the bulk of the costs and "sell" it to their people (if these issues are publicly discussed at all, preferably not).
Another important tool is the "americanization" of (not only our) culture, which has to a large extent been money-driven. It's purpose is to shape the social battlefield for take-over, by associating US paradigms (i.e. the neoliberal agenda) with the things that especially young people find hip. The next step is to build "national" social and political organizations that are actually financed and controlled by US government and big money. These organizations then penetrate political parties, grooming, featuring, and generously supporting suitable candidates for political careers, giving them a competitive advantage in the party-internal struggle for power. (I think "networking" is the modern euphemism for that.) This is how the likes of Baerbock, Macron, von der Leyen, and Trudeau came to power. It is certainly not masochism that drives these people, they personally profit considerably from it. For them, kissing up to US dominance and adhering to the mainstream agenda is just the price to be payed for success and the feeling of being important. Yes, it may require suppressing the occasional doubts about whether all this is really in the interest of their people; I guess this is a matter of selecting the "right" sort of people for these jobs.
It works similarly in other important areas, like the mass media and universities.
With billions of dollars to spare (because you own hundreds of them), an army of highly payed professionals to execute, and enough time, you can politically capture (i.e. corrupt) the elites of any nation, especially if it is (relatively) poor. Only those who shield their information space rigorously and very early in the process can withstand it. Of course countries can liberate themselves from this sort of domination by popular revolt against the incumbent elites, and much of the political crisis we see in Europe is a struggle to achieve exactly that, i.e. regain some sort of sovereignty.
I always see one main intention in Aurelien essays: he try to balance some reductionist explanations. By doing so, obviously, you always tend to be reductive in some way, but it is unavoidable. For transmit an idea for approaching reality you have to simplify it and let other things: that's how knowledge works. And then, another person like you come and give new and complementary information (or refutation even) making our knowledge better.
The reductionisms that Aurelien attack are the ones that simplify any political event like an effect of actions of strategic actors (or big potencies). He has pointed it many times, and he has make the good point that we must understand the main paper that regional powers have using this big players, not being only puppets. Also, he shows knowledge of sociology, because he explain why the States behave by "ad intra" factors. The endogamy of elites (cohabitation of plural cultural, political and economical groups) based one sharing one "cosmovision" about the world affects the values, the identity and the actions of the State. In this article, for example, following Brzezinski, he point well that it is easy for European leaders to clean their hands, neither by submission or by blaming; if you think, this is an easy electoral strategy because you don't have to show success. This, for example, could be explained by our knowledge of how institutions and democracies works, falling in an electoralism that only thinks in the short-term
His comment could be improved by your point. That process of cultural "americanisation" could be explained by economical reasons in a good portion; or the behave of a lot of cultural elites could be explained by transformation of communications with internet ant their need to be rescued (by big companies or by the States), affecting their partiality, or just fighting for attention diminishing the quality of the publications. The same goes to universities: a economical logic has affected it. Respecting economical powers, it is true that when their jump to "fiscal paradises" that are mainly American or British, their interests changes and "go away" from their respective countries. It is right also that NSA can pressure
some politicians and that "revolving doors" exists. We can see all the Green Policies as a mix of ideology, cultural endogamy and economical interests,¡.
However, we must understand that the behaviour of every person is a mix of multiple things to avoid and others to achieve, an that includes material interests, but also having the approbation of their peers, not loosing a job or simply felt well with himself, and that needs to avoid cognitive dissonance and to justify in a narrative way their behaviour. Cultural aspects, psychological, political and economical are mixed. That is, I think, what Aurelien wants to transmit in order to avoid excessive simplifications.
An excellent description of the "comprador elites" that the US has spawned around the world since the advent of Bretton Woods. To your list of agencies complicit in this process I would add the NED and USAID ...
Somewhere in Political Heaven, Mao is smiling, as his 2500-year-old, refreshed Confucianism (Socialism with Chinese characteristics) powers ahead.
"Ultimately, for this generation of incapable politicians and their parasites, it’s more acceptable to be thought to be creatures of a foreign power than it is to stand up and take responsibility for your own actions. A Big Boy did it and ran away."
Ever since 1945, europeans have discovered that the like being slaves, that they need to be slaves, the way a dog needs a Master. Some minor American functionary snaps his fingers and european knees hit the floor with a resolute thud, eyes glittering with delight, grateful for the opportunity to servie Master.
Just that europeans also think way too highly of themselves, so they see an American Master as preferable to a Russian master, or, God forbid, an Asian Master.
This is it:
"...almost total alienation of ordinary people from European political systems..."
That's right. And none of the intelligentsia are doing anything or even suggesting anything or even calling for, looking for anyone who might do anything to fix that.
Even here, see? Excellent article culminating in that truth and leaving it there.
Here's what I reckon would be a good starting point to aim for. An app. What's more contemporary than an app. Here's one that could change every thing.
DON'T WRITE TO CONGRESS
https://abrogard.com/blog/2023/12/25/dont-write-to-congress/
This is still not the way because it still belongs to govt. not the people and is still used only every few years -
but shows it could be done right NOW
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_voting_system
a little more in depth:
https://abrogard.com/blog/2024/10/14/how-about-this-to-bring-truth-to-the-elections/
I believe that the comment about European slavery was a British-ism.
In the early 1800s, Britain unilaterally declared the intercontinental slave trade to be illegal, and used the Royal Navy to suppress it. Britain also declared slavery illegal at home. This is always mentioned with high-minded comments about the moral superiority of John Bull Drummond.
I have an alternate, more practical explanation: slavery is most effective in tropical climates, and slowly loses effectiveness as you travel to the poles. Britain's colonial competitors all had their colonies in the tropics; Britain had tropical colonies also but most of the major ones were in temperate zones and the sub-arctic. The Caribbean tropical colonies depended on slaves imported from Africa. Aristocrats in the home countries controlled this trade by royal monopolies, and took a cut. By cutting off slave exports to tropical colonies, Britain forced French, Dutch, and Spanish colonies to switch to locally bred slaves, which created local middle class slave managers, which weakened the home country slave-owning aristocrats and created notions of independence in the colonies.
Cutting off this slave export/import trade was a brilliant strategic move in the great power competition of the colonial powers. Britain forced its colonial rivals to suffer political unrest in the colonies, to the level that Britain already suffered.
More on industrial slavery and geography: slaves don't like being slaves and they try to escape. In the tropics, plantations need a lot of slaves in a small area, so it is possible to afford enough thugs to keep the slaves in place. In temperate climes, one must exploit more and more land to support one plantation family, and slavery falls short. In sub-Arctic areas, it completely fails. Canada (I think) never had industrial slavery.