EU foreign-policy chief Josep Borrell confessed the West's neoliberal economic model was "based on cheap energy coming from Russia," "access to the big China market," and low-paid Chinese workers.
We grow up (in the US, probably UK, Canada, Australia) with a worldview we presume is universal - or at least better than anywhere else's. Nationalism, anglophilia, conveniently disregarding the toil and the foreign suffering we know goes into our food, our clothes, etc. We live complicit with an imperialism we've the luxury of not being forced to think about. It should be more corrosive than it is.
Some few of us learn too much of the truth to be OK with the brutal geopolitics of winners and losers - and try instead to stand against it. There's a heavy price to pay for betraying the empire. Ben Norton is labeled a traitor for exposing the sordid underbelly of the rules based order. He'll never be feted by the great and the good. The imperial state is ruthless when its interests are threatened. Julian Assange is being slowly murdered - not for any crime but as a warning to the likes of Ben what happens if you step further over the time.
I'm writing this because I was struck by an unexpected difference in the worldview of the "Anglo-American" and the continental European.
Until recently I'd seen the countries of the "West" as pretty much analogous but listening to Josep Borrell's glib explanation of the European position on the delegation of security to the USA, energy to Russia, and market to China. There was nothing boastful or bellicose in his pedestrian answers. Contrast his and other western Europeans to the likes of Biden, Blinken or Boris Johnson.
Borrell spoke like a decadent grown fat on a privilege he never questioned, talking of realignments as if Europe was always and will always be entitled to all the food, fuel and finery it desires. As a way of being in the world it's almost infantile. Does this describe the peculiarly degraded heart of the European elites?
Where America and the UK are pro-active in their cruel plundering of the world, Borrell gives the impression of Europe as Gian Gastone de Medici. The Anglo-Saxon ruling class has a long history of brutality, bigotry, and our society is fomented in individualism and nationalism (as if they're not mutually exclusive). But Europeans like Borrell may be worse, somehow. It's a difference I hadn't much considered before.
Probably a load of subjective horseshit but I liked the article so figured I'd spend five minutes typing up an immediate unfiltered reaction. And there it is!
All of these massive cracks in the weak, crumbling facade of Western post- and neo-colonial hegemony are so obvious to me, and so alarming as a person living in the West seeing just how dangerous and precarious this is, that I go around trying to talk to people about it all the time--and, when I do so, I am truly shocked to see how little people in general understand of it, at least in the U.S., often including even otherwise apparently educated, urbane people. In fact, supposed “less educated,” poorer working class people and POC who have already been long crushed by this insane oligarchic global capitalist system seem to get it much more. It’s like Marie Antoinette suggesting people eat cake before she went cluelessly to the guillotine. This EU economic official person seems to get it--but then why is he saying “My good friend Anthony Blinken” and “our excellent relations with the U.S.,” etc.? And why is he acting, like all of the other hypocritical neoliberal buffoons, as if the specter of an unpredictable Trump figure were the one great boogeyman in all this? Oh my God, he might actually try to deescalate things with Putin and strike some kind of a deal! How insane would that be? I vacillate constantly back and forth between thinking there must be some vast, hidden nefarious plan here, on one hand, and on the other considering the other good possibility that this is all just foolish desperation and hubris in the West, or karmic payback perhaps, and where centuries of greed and extraction and extortion have just naturally led us. Get ready, the centuries-old house of cards is tottering perilously, and there is pain on the horizon here such as we in the “prosperous,” privileged West have not known in many decades--and our cultures and political systems and our economic and political systems are not in the least prepared. The inevitable result, I think, will be a free fall of economic collapse and disintegration that the U.S. will try to counteract by means a continued rush to attempt to reseize control by military means. Also, rightwing fascism as the EU official notes. But there is a key tension there that the E.U guy mentions--that reckless decoupling of prosperity and security. At some point, the E.U. is going to have to revisit just going blithely along with the U.S. war machine and actually consider its own survival and natural interests. Maybe this winter.
To clarify a little: Your first paragraph misinterprets this speaker by asserting that he has ‘confessed’ that EU prosperity was due to ‘extraction of wealth’ from Russia and China. You are putting your own interpretation on his words which I consider to be very far from his intended meaning.
I don’t know whether you hold views in which ‘cheap’ is synonymous with ‘extracting wealth from’, but certainly that is not the usual meaning of the term, and in my experience it isn’t what EU officials mean. As you well know, importing gas from US is radically more expensive, for obvious reasons.
Your ‘extracting wealth’ term implies that the relatively low price of Russian gas was due to EU exploitation of some sort, but you haven’t made any argument to support that idea. Russia wasn’t in the position of all those ‘south’ countries who are indeed being ripped off by debt bondage and all those techniques you have written well about. But I don’t think the same case can easily be made about EU’s relationship with either Russia or China- at any rate I am very sure this EU official wasn’t ‘confessing’ to any such exploitation.
You don’t understand Europe, and your US prejudices are showing!
Fanning the flames of war against Russia will impoverish and trash Europe. There is nothing good about any of that destruction.
Please bring in some good European journalists to help you understand their speeches. Your interpretation of this one is wildly off!
Ben, I greatly value your work, and especially appreciated both the care you take to be factually accurate, and the extent to which you have been able to rise above your own background to gain such an unusual quality of understanding of Latin American cultures, including the accomplishment of learning to speak and write properly in Spanish. Also I have greatly valued your reporting on Pakistan, which is outstanding.
BUT: You do not understand Europe! Your interpretation of speeches by European officials has been irritatingly off the mark, because you do not understand the cultures remotely well enough to be able to interpret the context and hence the implications. Your remarks sound like the prejudices of your US background.
PLEASE use your excellent Spanish to cultivate relationships with some of the best Spanish investigative journalists to help you understand Europe better before trying to pronounce about it all. Or get a combination of journalists from different European countries to debate interpretation with you.
Or stick to what you do best! More on Pakistan would be welcome.
We grow up (in the US, probably UK, Canada, Australia) with a worldview we presume is universal - or at least better than anywhere else's. Nationalism, anglophilia, conveniently disregarding the toil and the foreign suffering we know goes into our food, our clothes, etc. We live complicit with an imperialism we've the luxury of not being forced to think about. It should be more corrosive than it is.
Some few of us learn too much of the truth to be OK with the brutal geopolitics of winners and losers - and try instead to stand against it. There's a heavy price to pay for betraying the empire. Ben Norton is labeled a traitor for exposing the sordid underbelly of the rules based order. He'll never be feted by the great and the good. The imperial state is ruthless when its interests are threatened. Julian Assange is being slowly murdered - not for any crime but as a warning to the likes of Ben what happens if you step further over the time.
I'm writing this because I was struck by an unexpected difference in the worldview of the "Anglo-American" and the continental European.
Until recently I'd seen the countries of the "West" as pretty much analogous but listening to Josep Borrell's glib explanation of the European position on the delegation of security to the USA, energy to Russia, and market to China. There was nothing boastful or bellicose in his pedestrian answers. Contrast his and other western Europeans to the likes of Biden, Blinken or Boris Johnson.
Borrell spoke like a decadent grown fat on a privilege he never questioned, talking of realignments as if Europe was always and will always be entitled to all the food, fuel and finery it desires. As a way of being in the world it's almost infantile. Does this describe the peculiarly degraded heart of the European elites?
Where America and the UK are pro-active in their cruel plundering of the world, Borrell gives the impression of Europe as Gian Gastone de Medici. The Anglo-Saxon ruling class has a long history of brutality, bigotry, and our society is fomented in individualism and nationalism (as if they're not mutually exclusive). But Europeans like Borrell may be worse, somehow. It's a difference I hadn't much considered before.
Probably a load of subjective horseshit but I liked the article so figured I'd spend five minutes typing up an immediate unfiltered reaction. And there it is!
(Could've edited the above but I'll leave it as is - except to fix a typo - it's only a comment after all...)
All of these massive cracks in the weak, crumbling facade of Western post- and neo-colonial hegemony are so obvious to me, and so alarming as a person living in the West seeing just how dangerous and precarious this is, that I go around trying to talk to people about it all the time--and, when I do so, I am truly shocked to see how little people in general understand of it, at least in the U.S., often including even otherwise apparently educated, urbane people. In fact, supposed “less educated,” poorer working class people and POC who have already been long crushed by this insane oligarchic global capitalist system seem to get it much more. It’s like Marie Antoinette suggesting people eat cake before she went cluelessly to the guillotine. This EU economic official person seems to get it--but then why is he saying “My good friend Anthony Blinken” and “our excellent relations with the U.S.,” etc.? And why is he acting, like all of the other hypocritical neoliberal buffoons, as if the specter of an unpredictable Trump figure were the one great boogeyman in all this? Oh my God, he might actually try to deescalate things with Putin and strike some kind of a deal! How insane would that be? I vacillate constantly back and forth between thinking there must be some vast, hidden nefarious plan here, on one hand, and on the other considering the other good possibility that this is all just foolish desperation and hubris in the West, or karmic payback perhaps, and where centuries of greed and extraction and extortion have just naturally led us. Get ready, the centuries-old house of cards is tottering perilously, and there is pain on the horizon here such as we in the “prosperous,” privileged West have not known in many decades--and our cultures and political systems and our economic and political systems are not in the least prepared. The inevitable result, I think, will be a free fall of economic collapse and disintegration that the U.S. will try to counteract by means a continued rush to attempt to reseize control by military means. Also, rightwing fascism as the EU official notes. But there is a key tension there that the E.U guy mentions--that reckless decoupling of prosperity and security. At some point, the E.U. is going to have to revisit just going blithely along with the U.S. war machine and actually consider its own survival and natural interests. Maybe this winter.
When Victoria Nuland said "fuck the EU" she was stating general US State Department policy, which is insane.
"EU confesses 'our prosperity was based on China & Russia': cheap energy, low-paid labor, big market"
As we should expect from Capitalists their modus opperandi was rape and pillage but no they realise they can't survive without China and Russia.
Cry me a river.
To clarify a little: Your first paragraph misinterprets this speaker by asserting that he has ‘confessed’ that EU prosperity was due to ‘extraction of wealth’ from Russia and China. You are putting your own interpretation on his words which I consider to be very far from his intended meaning.
I don’t know whether you hold views in which ‘cheap’ is synonymous with ‘extracting wealth from’, but certainly that is not the usual meaning of the term, and in my experience it isn’t what EU officials mean. As you well know, importing gas from US is radically more expensive, for obvious reasons.
Your ‘extracting wealth’ term implies that the relatively low price of Russian gas was due to EU exploitation of some sort, but you haven’t made any argument to support that idea. Russia wasn’t in the position of all those ‘south’ countries who are indeed being ripped off by debt bondage and all those techniques you have written well about. But I don’t think the same case can easily be made about EU’s relationship with either Russia or China- at any rate I am very sure this EU official wasn’t ‘confessing’ to any such exploitation.
You don’t understand Europe, and your US prejudices are showing!
Fanning the flames of war against Russia will impoverish and trash Europe. There is nothing good about any of that destruction.
Please bring in some good European journalists to help you understand their speeches. Your interpretation of this one is wildly off!
Ben, I greatly value your work, and especially appreciated both the care you take to be factually accurate, and the extent to which you have been able to rise above your own background to gain such an unusual quality of understanding of Latin American cultures, including the accomplishment of learning to speak and write properly in Spanish. Also I have greatly valued your reporting on Pakistan, which is outstanding.
BUT: You do not understand Europe! Your interpretation of speeches by European officials has been irritatingly off the mark, because you do not understand the cultures remotely well enough to be able to interpret the context and hence the implications. Your remarks sound like the prejudices of your US background.
PLEASE use your excellent Spanish to cultivate relationships with some of the best Spanish investigative journalists to help you understand Europe better before trying to pronounce about it all. Or get a combination of journalists from different European countries to debate interpretation with you.
Or stick to what you do best! More on Pakistan would be welcome.