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The Geopolitics of it all

Janet Daley is a favourite author of mine. She is an American Jew that started off life as a Marxist and an acolyte of the New Left, and ended up, some decades later, in London writing for the very conservative Telegraph...

So when she says this I believe she speaks with authority.

The creation of this confusion over what counts as a fact has been the object of Leftist subversion for generations. In the heyday of the New Left, when the old Marxist doctrines were being refashioned to suit new cultural ideas, the slogan was, “objective truth is a bourgeois construct”. The “facts” that are offered by powerful authorities are just traps created by the ruling class to keep people enslaved.

This current orthodoxy of personal truth is a direct descendant of that ideology. It is not new or original. (Indeed, the primacy of feelings and intuition over provable, disinterested knowledge has very old roots in mysticism and superstition.) It is being promulgated now by people who actually believe that they are advocating a more communal way of life when what they are really promoting is a form of solipsistic, isolated existence which would make it impossible for human beings to understand one another, let alone share a common cause.


In the awakened future of this brave new world, truth is whatever you feel it to be. It is your emotional needs and reactions – driven by your own psychological imperatives – that determine “your truth” which must be accepted by the world as “valid”. It is clear that this promotion of what could be seen as pathological narcissism and disassociation from normal social expectations has been permitted to run riot through official and governmental institutions to such an extent that defying it now takes immense moral courage.

It is impossible to exaggerate what is at stake here. It is nothing less than the understanding of what is real, of what constitutes evidence for a true belief. Without reliable and consistent standards for the verifiable meaning of the word “true”, it is literally impossible to make sense of anything.

But there is movement ...

The combined party political forces which run the Irish government clearly thought they were on a roll. They were leading their historically conservative Catholic country into a modern progressive consensus with the enthusiastic gratitude of a liberated people. So confident were they that their attitudes were universally welcomed that they presumed to alter their country’s constitution in ways that would seal this change irrevocably.

The electorate were offered two referenda designed to eliminate the anachronistic words “mother” and “woman” from the great founding document. This was clearly going to be a triumph of the newly enlightened nation which would gratefully, indeed ecstatically, embrace its contemporary identity by a large majority.

Guess what happened. Not only were both these votes overwhelmingly defeated but the humiliation of that misjudgment was almost certainly the chief cause of the presiding Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar’s, resignation.

This was not just a political miscalculation. It was a catastrophic failure by the governing elite (a term which has now become indispensable in political analysis) to remain in touch with the actual opinions of the people who elected them.


....

There seems to be a mood supportive of disruptors.

Every now and then there is a popular cry for Reform!

And sometimes they have effect.


The Reform movement in Upper Canada was a political movement in British North America in the mid-19th century.

It started as a rudimentary grouping of loose coalitions that formed around contentious issues. Support was gained in Parliament through petitions meant to sway MPs. However, organized Reform activity emerged in the 1830s when Reformers, like Robert Randal, Jesse Ketchum, Peter Perry, Marshall Spring Bidwell, and William Warren Baldwin, began to emulate the organizational forms of the British Reform Movement and organized Political Unions under the leadership of William Lyon Mackenzie. The British Political Unions had successfully petitioned for the Great Reform Act of 1832 that eliminated much political corruption in the English Parliamentary system. Those who adopted these new forms of public mobilization for democratic reform in Upper Canada were inspired by the more radical Owenite Socialists who led the British Chartist and Mechanics Institute movements.


Reformism is a type of social movement that aims to bring a social or also a political system closer to the community's ideal. A reform movement is distinguished from more radical social movements such as revolutionary movements which reject those old ideals, in that the ideas are often grounded in liberalism, although they may be rooted in socialist (specifically, social democratic) or religious concepts. Some rely on personal transformation; others rely on small collectives, such as Mahatma Gandhi's spinning wheel and the self-sustaining village economy, as a mode of social change. Reactionary movements, which can arise against any of these, attempt to put things back the way they were before any successes the new reform movement(s) enjoyed, or to prevent any such successes.
 
And, in Europe, Macron vs Scholz

Differences of opinion between the two men abound.

Scholz has strong anti-nuclear and pacifist leanings, inherited from his formative years on the hard left of the Juso, the Socialist Youth, in the early 1980s.

He belonged to the “Better Red Than Dead/Atomkraft, nein danke” generation, which rejected nuclear power, civil or military.
Germany has been phasing out power plants for years.

Macron, meanwhile, has advocated for a nuclear “renaissance”, promising to build up to 14 new nuclear reactors by 2050.

Scholz marched against the deployment of Pershing missiles in Germany, demanding Germany leave Nato. In 1984, as a Juso leader, he appeared on East German State television, with Egon Krenz, then East Germany’s leader. (Scholz has since mentioned his “detox” from extreme opinions.)


Macron, while initially reluctant to challenge Russia in Ukraine, is today far more strident.

The two men have clashed in public on multiple occasions, always hastily arranging a photoshoot afterwards to insist they are actually on good terms.

Yet tensions are ratcheting up as the war in Ukraine drags on.

“Emmanuel Macron has made a spectacular two-year journey from apparent dove to leading hawk since February 2022,” says Mujtaba Rahman, the Europe Director for the Eurasia Group, a leading think tank.

The French president evolved “from would-be Putin intermediary to implacable Putin foe”. He has gone from saying “‘Don’t humiliate Russia’ (2022), to ‘Russia must be defeated’ (2023) to today’s war leader,” notes Rahma


Macron is also pushing back against what is seen in Paris as wilful denial of resources to Ukraine. Berlin was slow to send Leopard tanks to Ukraine and is now resisting sending Taurus long-range missiles.

There was anger in Paris when the Kiel Institute, a German think tank, compared the amount of arms and equipment sent by Germany (€17bn worth) and by France (€900m to €2bn depending on how you count).

“The provoking Kiel release aimed to camouflage Olaf Scholz’s flat refusal to send Taurus long-range missiles to Ukraine,”
says Norbert Röttgen, a Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) MP and until three years ago the head of the Bundestag’s Foreign Affairs Committee.

“Chancellor Scholz still believes that Germany should not be perceived as an aggressor by Russia. It was the same with Leopard tanks. Because of our delays the Ukrainian offensive was crucially stalled. Ukrainians died.”

Röttgen believes Scholz suffers from a fatal flaw of timidity. He believes Scholz is unable to realise “that all of us in the West will be more vulnerable if Ukraine loses, or even if it has to make major compromises with Russia.”

Röttgen’s – and CDU leader Friedrich Merz’s – assessment now match Macron’s own conviction, but it is not likely to soften Scholz’s attitude. Scholz is locked in a Liberal-Green-SDP coalition whose well-documented discord could at any moment trigger a snap election before the set 2025 date. The polls are not encouraging.

“Often, depending on whom you ask within the German government, you can get three different answers. And Scholz is incapable of arbitrating,” says a Paris source.

No coincidence then that Germany’s public opinion so far supports not sending Taurus missiles to Ukraine. Scholz has no mandate to do much more than listen.

But the German Greens, Liberals and Christian Democrats all seem to be vociferous supporters of Ukraine and of assisting Ukraine.

Ostis and Westis?
 
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