Saturday, February 25, 2017 7:17:21 PM
The Unmaking of Europe
Geert Wilders of the Dutch Party for Freedom speaking to the media as he arrives at the Senate in The Hague this month.
Bart Maat/European Pressphoto Agency
By Roger Cohen
FEB. 24, 2017
MADRID — Something is brewing. The world is not as it was. Beneath the Magic Mountain grim tides gather. You hear this kind of thing all over Europe. Old assumptions seem obsolete. Apprehension is in the air.
Let’s connect some dots. Last November, Britain’s Daily Mail screamed
[ https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CwXwe6AXUAQsiCp.jpg ] “Enemies of the People!” on its front page. The target was Britain’s lord chief justice and two other judges who had ruled that the formal process of British exit from the European Union — known as Article 50 — could not be triggered without a parliamentary vote. This was too much for the howling Brexit wolves of The Mail.
Fast-forward to President Trump using the same phrase — “enemy of the American people” — for the news media, having already taken aim at the judiciary, dismissing as a “so-called judge [ https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/827867311054974976 ]” the man who had halted his rabble-rousing travel ban against seven mainly Muslim countries.
Trump heads a movement. It needs to be fed. It is hungry. Its enemies include Hollywood and the press [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/opinion/preserving-the-sanctity-of-all-facts.html ] (with a few exceptions). It demands energy, disruption and anger to grow.
“Enemy of the people” is a phrase with a near-perfect totalitarian pedigree deployed with refinements by the Nazis, Stalin and Mao. For Goebbels, writing in 1941 [ http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb1.htm ], every Jew was “a sworn enemy of the German people.” Here the “people” are an aroused mob imbued with some mythical essence of nationhood or goodness by a charismatic leader. The enemy is everyone else. Citizenship, with its shared rights and responsibilities, has ceased to be.
Liberal Western democracies depend on various institutions to mediate differences and provide the checks and balances of lawful governance. They include a free press, an independent judiciary, political parties and the Congress or parliament. All are under withering attack from the populist, xenophobic nationalists who are attempting, on both sides of the Atlantic, to replace representative democracy with something else.
What that 21st-century “something” may be is not completely clear, but it involves a direct social-media connection between the leader and the people that circumvents mainstream parties and the press, and brands all critics as enemies of the movement. Representative democracy then yields by degrees to a system driven by plebiscite, referendums, intimidation and lies — of the kind that produced the victories of Brexit and Trump.
There is a movement in people’s minds. They occur periodically in history. They are potent.
A methodical attack on the institutions of Western democracies has one ultimate objective: their replacement with the “soft” autocracies of which President Vladimir Putin of Russia is the supreme exponent [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/21/opinion/the-russification-of-america.html (in full below)]. The lifeblood of autocracies is the glorification of a mythical past and the designation of enemies who stand in the way of greatness.
“Nationalism is war,” François Mitterrand, the former French president, observed. That is the end point of the fear mongering used by the nationalists being elevated as representative democracy frays. Nigel Farage, the clownish leader of the Brexit campaign, is the natural ally of Trump.
CPAC 2017 - Nigel Farage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ww5Vzb1Y5TQ [with comments]
Technology has enabled many things, among them the apotheosis of stupidity.
In Europe, the next act is being readied. The Party for Freedom, or PVV, of Geert Wilders, the rabid anti-immigrant Dutch politician, may emerge as the country’s largest political force in elections next month, even if he proves unable to form a coalition government. The PVV is a very flimsy political organization but Wilders — like Trump — wields an effective Twitter account emblazoned with “STOP ISLAM [ https://twitter.com/geertwilderspvv/status/825028762546868226?lang=en ].” He hates Moroccan [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/18/world/europe/geert-wilders-netherlands-freedom-party-moroccan-immigrants.html ] immigrants (whom he had called “scum”) and the European Union.
Then, in April, France will vote for its next president, with the rightist Marine Le Pen in serious contention [ http://www.smh.com.au/world/marine-le-pen-increases-first-round-lead-in-french-election-poll-20170223-gujkzl.html ]. Le Pen is a direct descendant of the xenophobic French nationalism that produced the Dreyfus Affair in the late 19th century, the Jew-slaughtering Vichy government in World War II [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/w/world_war_ii_/index.html ], and her own National Front party in more recent times. She has modulated her message but that is her lineage. Nobody should doubt it. If she wins, the European Union could unravel, a development Trump seems to favor. European peace and stability would not be far behind.
Connect the dots. For the Brexit crowd, the enemy was immigrants, Germany, Turks, European bureaucrats. For Trump it was Muslims and Mexicans. The mythical past found expression in Britain’s “I want my country back” and across the Atlantic in “make America great again.” In both countries flat-out lies galvanized the campaigns.
These methods worked. They worked because of growing precariousness, inequality, impunity, alienation, globalization, tribalism, powerlessness, bombardment and cacophony — all the failures of democracies and bewilderments of digital disruption.
But the lesson is that democracies must adapt, not that they must be swept away. There are ascendant movements that want to replace democracy. They use phrases like “enemy of the American people.”
Emile Zola, the French writer, confronted by the bigots and liars of his day, wrote: “When truth is buried underground it grows, it chokes, it gathers such an explosive force that on the day it bursts out, it blows up everything with it.”
“Only connect,” wrote E.M. Forster, the British novelist. Only connect. Only confront.
© 2017 The New York Times Company
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/opinion/the-unmaking-of-europe.html [with comments]
*
The Russification of America
Vice President Mike Pence arriving in Munich last week.
Michaela Rehle/Reuters
By Roger Cohen
FEB. 21, 2017
MUNICH — This Munich Security Conference was different. A Frenchman defended NATO against the American president. The Russian foreign minister was here but the phantom American secretary of state was not. An ex-Swedish prime minister had to respond [ https://twitter.com/carlbildt/status/833219648044855296 ] to the “last-night-in-Sweden affair” — an ominous incident in a placid Scandinavian state dreamed up in his refugee delirium by Donald Trump.
Surreal hardly begins to describe the proceedings at this annual gathering, the Davos of foreign policy. This is what happens when the United States is all over the place. Allies get nervous; they don’t know what to believe. “Trump’s uncontrolled communication is unsettling the world,” John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, told me. That is an understatement. The Trump doctrine is chaos [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/world/a-worried-europe-finds-scant-reassurance-on-trumps-plans.html ].
Vice President Mike Pence came, communicated and exited without taking questions. He said the United States would be “unwavering [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/18/world/europe/pence-munich-speech-nato-merkel.html ]” in its commitment to NATO, whose glories he extolled. (He never mentioned the European Union, whose fragmentation Trump encourages.)
If a question had been allowed, it might have been: “Mr. Pence, you defend NATO but your boss says it’s obsolete. So which is it?”
To which the answer could well have been: “This is an administration that says everything and the contrary of everything. I advise you to get used to it — and pay up.”
But getting used to an American president who responds through Twitter to the last guy in the room or what he’s just seen on TV, has no notion of or interest in European history, and has turned America’s word into junk, is not easy. Europeans are reeling.
Jean-Marc Ayrault, the French foreign minister, insisted that, “We certainly cannot say that NATO is obsolete.” (For a long time the French kind of wished it was.) Wolfgang Ischinger, the chairman of the Munich conference, told Deutsche Welle [ http://www.dw.com/en/world-leaders-tackle-uncertainty-at-the-heart-of-global-order/a-37608782 ] that if Trump continues to advocate against the European Union it would amount to a “nonmilitary declaration of war.” Those are extraordinary words from a distinguished former German ambassador about the American president.
For me, the most troubling thing was finding myself unsure who was more credible — Pence or Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. The Russification of America under Trump has proceeded apace. Vladimir Putin’s macho authoritarianism, disdain for the press, and mockery of the truth has installed itself on the Potomac.
Putin is only the latest exponent of what John le Carré called “the classic, timeless, all-Russian, barefaced, whopping lie” and what Joseph Conrad before him called Russian officialdom’s “almost sublime disdain for the truth.”
The Russian system under Putin is a false democracy based on a Potemkin village of props — political parties, media, judiciary — that are the fig leaf covering repression or elimination of opponents. Russia runs on lies. It’s alternative-fact central (you know, there are no Russian troops in Ukraine). But what happens when the United States begins to be infected with Russian disease?
Pence’s speech may not have been precisely a barefaced whopping lie, but it certainly showed barefaced whopping disdain for the intelligence of the audience (you know, nothing has changed with Trump, ha-ha.) By comparison, Lavrov was blunt. He announced [ http://www.dw.com/en/lavrov-calls-for-post-west-world-order-dismisses-nato-as-cold-war-relic/a-37614099 ] the dawn of the “post-West world order.” That became a theme. Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister, announced the “post-Western global order.”
I wonder what that means — perhaps a world of lies, repression, unreason and violence. It advances as America offers only incoherence. To counter the drift, what is needed? A functioning American State Department would be a start.
Right now, Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, cuts a lonely figure, his reasonable choice of deputy nixed by Trump, his authority (if any) unclear. America today has no foreign policy. It’s veering between empty reaffirmations of old bonds (Pence) and the scattershot anti-Muslim, Sweden-syndrome, anti-trade, bellicose, what’s-in-it-for-me mercantilism of Trump.
Month two of this presidency needs to produce a capacity to speak with one voice. It was interesting to see John Kelly, the secretary of Homeland Security, talk about a coming revised travel ban order for seven mainly Muslim countries and say that “this time [ https://twitter.com/daily_mail_/status/833610694859845636 ]” he’d be able to work on the rollout plan. Rough translation: last time he was cut out of the process and it was a real mess. Almost everything has been.
I’m skeptical of Trump ever running a disciplined administration. His feelings about Europe are already clear and won’t change. The European Union needs to step into the moral void by standing unequivocally for the values that must define the West: truth, facts, reason, science, tolerance, freedom, democracy and the rule of law. For now it’s unclear if the Trump administration is friend or foe in that fight.
Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister, joked to me that the most terrifying aspect of Trump’s “incident” in Sweden was “the suppression of it by all the major Swedish newspapers, and even Swedish citizens.” We laughed. The unfunny moment will come when Trump lashes out based on nothing but fervid imaginings and the “post-West” order stumbles from confusion into conflagration.
© 2017 The New York Times Company
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/21/opinion/the-russification-of-america.html [with comments]
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Geert Wilders of the Dutch Party for Freedom speaking to the media as he arrives at the Senate in The Hague this month.
Bart Maat/European Pressphoto Agency
By Roger Cohen
FEB. 24, 2017
MADRID — Something is brewing. The world is not as it was. Beneath the Magic Mountain grim tides gather. You hear this kind of thing all over Europe. Old assumptions seem obsolete. Apprehension is in the air.
Let’s connect some dots. Last November, Britain’s Daily Mail screamed
[ https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CwXwe6AXUAQsiCp.jpg ] “Enemies of the People!” on its front page. The target was Britain’s lord chief justice and two other judges who had ruled that the formal process of British exit from the European Union — known as Article 50 — could not be triggered without a parliamentary vote. This was too much for the howling Brexit wolves of The Mail.
Fast-forward to President Trump using the same phrase — “enemy of the American people” — for the news media, having already taken aim at the judiciary, dismissing as a “so-called judge [ https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/827867311054974976 ]” the man who had halted his rabble-rousing travel ban against seven mainly Muslim countries.
Trump heads a movement. It needs to be fed. It is hungry. Its enemies include Hollywood and the press [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/opinion/preserving-the-sanctity-of-all-facts.html ] (with a few exceptions). It demands energy, disruption and anger to grow.
“Enemy of the people” is a phrase with a near-perfect totalitarian pedigree deployed with refinements by the Nazis, Stalin and Mao. For Goebbels, writing in 1941 [ http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb1.htm ], every Jew was “a sworn enemy of the German people.” Here the “people” are an aroused mob imbued with some mythical essence of nationhood or goodness by a charismatic leader. The enemy is everyone else. Citizenship, with its shared rights and responsibilities, has ceased to be.
Liberal Western democracies depend on various institutions to mediate differences and provide the checks and balances of lawful governance. They include a free press, an independent judiciary, political parties and the Congress or parliament. All are under withering attack from the populist, xenophobic nationalists who are attempting, on both sides of the Atlantic, to replace representative democracy with something else.
What that 21st-century “something” may be is not completely clear, but it involves a direct social-media connection between the leader and the people that circumvents mainstream parties and the press, and brands all critics as enemies of the movement. Representative democracy then yields by degrees to a system driven by plebiscite, referendums, intimidation and lies — of the kind that produced the victories of Brexit and Trump.
There is a movement in people’s minds. They occur periodically in history. They are potent.
A methodical attack on the institutions of Western democracies has one ultimate objective: their replacement with the “soft” autocracies of which President Vladimir Putin of Russia is the supreme exponent [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/21/opinion/the-russification-of-america.html (in full below)]. The lifeblood of autocracies is the glorification of a mythical past and the designation of enemies who stand in the way of greatness.
“Nationalism is war,” François Mitterrand, the former French president, observed. That is the end point of the fear mongering used by the nationalists being elevated as representative democracy frays. Nigel Farage, the clownish leader of the Brexit campaign, is the natural ally of Trump.
CPAC 2017 - Nigel Farage
Published on Feb 24, 2017 by The ACU [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVlD5RMKD1bv-JiAT7KVX5Q / http://www.youtube.com/user/ACUConservativeUSA , http://www.youtube.com/user/ACUConservativeUSA/videos , http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmqnjF1D2hhYONeFVItHvLgmH_HPjRbv4 ]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ww5Vzb1Y5TQ [with comments]
Technology has enabled many things, among them the apotheosis of stupidity.
In Europe, the next act is being readied. The Party for Freedom, or PVV, of Geert Wilders, the rabid anti-immigrant Dutch politician, may emerge as the country’s largest political force in elections next month, even if he proves unable to form a coalition government. The PVV is a very flimsy political organization but Wilders — like Trump — wields an effective Twitter account emblazoned with “STOP ISLAM [ https://twitter.com/geertwilderspvv/status/825028762546868226?lang=en ].” He hates Moroccan [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/18/world/europe/geert-wilders-netherlands-freedom-party-moroccan-immigrants.html ] immigrants (whom he had called “scum”) and the European Union.
Then, in April, France will vote for its next president, with the rightist Marine Le Pen in serious contention [ http://www.smh.com.au/world/marine-le-pen-increases-first-round-lead-in-french-election-poll-20170223-gujkzl.html ]. Le Pen is a direct descendant of the xenophobic French nationalism that produced the Dreyfus Affair in the late 19th century, the Jew-slaughtering Vichy government in World War II [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/w/world_war_ii_/index.html ], and her own National Front party in more recent times. She has modulated her message but that is her lineage. Nobody should doubt it. If she wins, the European Union could unravel, a development Trump seems to favor. European peace and stability would not be far behind.
Connect the dots. For the Brexit crowd, the enemy was immigrants, Germany, Turks, European bureaucrats. For Trump it was Muslims and Mexicans. The mythical past found expression in Britain’s “I want my country back” and across the Atlantic in “make America great again.” In both countries flat-out lies galvanized the campaigns.
These methods worked. They worked because of growing precariousness, inequality, impunity, alienation, globalization, tribalism, powerlessness, bombardment and cacophony — all the failures of democracies and bewilderments of digital disruption.
But the lesson is that democracies must adapt, not that they must be swept away. There are ascendant movements that want to replace democracy. They use phrases like “enemy of the American people.”
Emile Zola, the French writer, confronted by the bigots and liars of his day, wrote: “When truth is buried underground it grows, it chokes, it gathers such an explosive force that on the day it bursts out, it blows up everything with it.”
“Only connect,” wrote E.M. Forster, the British novelist. Only connect. Only confront.
© 2017 The New York Times Company
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/opinion/the-unmaking-of-europe.html [with comments]
*
The Russification of America
Vice President Mike Pence arriving in Munich last week.
Michaela Rehle/Reuters
By Roger Cohen
FEB. 21, 2017
MUNICH — This Munich Security Conference was different. A Frenchman defended NATO against the American president. The Russian foreign minister was here but the phantom American secretary of state was not. An ex-Swedish prime minister had to respond [ https://twitter.com/carlbildt/status/833219648044855296 ] to the “last-night-in-Sweden affair” — an ominous incident in a placid Scandinavian state dreamed up in his refugee delirium by Donald Trump.
Surreal hardly begins to describe the proceedings at this annual gathering, the Davos of foreign policy. This is what happens when the United States is all over the place. Allies get nervous; they don’t know what to believe. “Trump’s uncontrolled communication is unsettling the world,” John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, told me. That is an understatement. The Trump doctrine is chaos [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/world/a-worried-europe-finds-scant-reassurance-on-trumps-plans.html ].
Vice President Mike Pence came, communicated and exited without taking questions. He said the United States would be “unwavering [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/18/world/europe/pence-munich-speech-nato-merkel.html ]” in its commitment to NATO, whose glories he extolled. (He never mentioned the European Union, whose fragmentation Trump encourages.)
If a question had been allowed, it might have been: “Mr. Pence, you defend NATO but your boss says it’s obsolete. So which is it?”
To which the answer could well have been: “This is an administration that says everything and the contrary of everything. I advise you to get used to it — and pay up.”
But getting used to an American president who responds through Twitter to the last guy in the room or what he’s just seen on TV, has no notion of or interest in European history, and has turned America’s word into junk, is not easy. Europeans are reeling.
Jean-Marc Ayrault, the French foreign minister, insisted that, “We certainly cannot say that NATO is obsolete.” (For a long time the French kind of wished it was.) Wolfgang Ischinger, the chairman of the Munich conference, told Deutsche Welle [ http://www.dw.com/en/world-leaders-tackle-uncertainty-at-the-heart-of-global-order/a-37608782 ] that if Trump continues to advocate against the European Union it would amount to a “nonmilitary declaration of war.” Those are extraordinary words from a distinguished former German ambassador about the American president.
For me, the most troubling thing was finding myself unsure who was more credible — Pence or Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. The Russification of America under Trump has proceeded apace. Vladimir Putin’s macho authoritarianism, disdain for the press, and mockery of the truth has installed itself on the Potomac.
Putin is only the latest exponent of what John le Carré called “the classic, timeless, all-Russian, barefaced, whopping lie” and what Joseph Conrad before him called Russian officialdom’s “almost sublime disdain for the truth.”
The Russian system under Putin is a false democracy based on a Potemkin village of props — political parties, media, judiciary — that are the fig leaf covering repression or elimination of opponents. Russia runs on lies. It’s alternative-fact central (you know, there are no Russian troops in Ukraine). But what happens when the United States begins to be infected with Russian disease?
Pence’s speech may not have been precisely a barefaced whopping lie, but it certainly showed barefaced whopping disdain for the intelligence of the audience (you know, nothing has changed with Trump, ha-ha.) By comparison, Lavrov was blunt. He announced [ http://www.dw.com/en/lavrov-calls-for-post-west-world-order-dismisses-nato-as-cold-war-relic/a-37614099 ] the dawn of the “post-West world order.” That became a theme. Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister, announced the “post-Western global order.”
I wonder what that means — perhaps a world of lies, repression, unreason and violence. It advances as America offers only incoherence. To counter the drift, what is needed? A functioning American State Department would be a start.
Right now, Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, cuts a lonely figure, his reasonable choice of deputy nixed by Trump, his authority (if any) unclear. America today has no foreign policy. It’s veering between empty reaffirmations of old bonds (Pence) and the scattershot anti-Muslim, Sweden-syndrome, anti-trade, bellicose, what’s-in-it-for-me mercantilism of Trump.
Month two of this presidency needs to produce a capacity to speak with one voice. It was interesting to see John Kelly, the secretary of Homeland Security, talk about a coming revised travel ban order for seven mainly Muslim countries and say that “this time [ https://twitter.com/daily_mail_/status/833610694859845636 ]” he’d be able to work on the rollout plan. Rough translation: last time he was cut out of the process and it was a real mess. Almost everything has been.
I’m skeptical of Trump ever running a disciplined administration. His feelings about Europe are already clear and won’t change. The European Union needs to step into the moral void by standing unequivocally for the values that must define the West: truth, facts, reason, science, tolerance, freedom, democracy and the rule of law. For now it’s unclear if the Trump administration is friend or foe in that fight.
Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister, joked to me that the most terrifying aspect of Trump’s “incident” in Sweden was “the suppression of it by all the major Swedish newspapers, and even Swedish citizens.” We laughed. The unfunny moment will come when Trump lashes out based on nothing but fervid imaginings and the “post-West” order stumbles from confusion into conflagration.
© 2017 The New York Times Company
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/21/opinion/the-russification-of-america.html [with comments]
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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