European leaders are gobsmacked, today apparently, by Trump’s threat to take over Greenland, which is ‘owned’ by Denmark, a member of the European Union. The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and the European Council president Antionio Costa, said nothing on the subject, despite many opportunities to mention this earth-shattering matter in public.
We are clearly living
in interesting times (a Chinese curse), where all of our dear western leaders
sacred human values are being shown up by circumstances in which they are
forced to blatantly contradict them.
First there is the attempted
genocide in Gaza, fuelled by support and weaponry from the US, carried out under
the leadership of President Joe Biden while complaining about the lesser Russian
atrocities in Ukraine. Then, the greatest western democracy, the USA, gives us
the spectacle of a ‘choice’ between two fascists, one a self-confessed Christian
Zionist fascist, Biden, whose mental faculties appeared to be fading (was this
a ruse by which future US politicians could excuse these war crimes?), and the
other, well, called Donald Trump.
As we know, Trump won,
because at least he was not currently a genocidal maniac. Now we are in a
period of the reverberations that this result causes. Apart from the richest
man in the world, Elon Musk, giving a Hitler salute in celebration, twice, just
to be sure the neo-Nazis get it, miraculously there is a ceasefire in the
Israel/Gaza conflict. But USAid has suddenly been halted everywhere by Trump decree,
including Ukraine, which is in the middle of a war that the US and NATO helped instigate.
On top of this, UNRWA is to be shut down in Israel by Israel’s government. Millions
of people rely on this aid simply to stay alive.
And then there is
Greenland.
New US President Donald
Trump wants Greenland. Seriously. He is not joking. Denmark, its colonial
power, is a member of NATO as well as the European Union. You may recall that
an attack on one NATO country is to be treated as an attack on all, but the USA
leads this military alliance, and it would seem totally weird if NATO were to even
talk about defending Denmark against the US, this is clearly not what is meant
to happen. So, there is silence on the matter.
Clearly NATO is not
really meant to support ALL sovereign borders, especially not those desired by
the US. And this follows close on the heels of the general rejection by the US
and western elites of all those other great global humanist institutions, such
as the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, in
the wake of Gaza war crimes.
How did US democracy,
so controlled and channelled, lead to this strange result, Trump, the EU politicians
must be wondering. Well, the US class struggle has certain internal social needs
that do not always coincide neatly with its outward imperialist tendencies. So Ukraine
is now in another crisis, there is some doubt over the willingness of the EU to
even in a small way conflict with Trump’s hands-off attitude towards this war, despite
their recent rhetoric of continued support for Ukraine against Russia’s
invasion.
Ukraine is not a
member of NATO. Russia does not want it to become a member of this military
alliance. Why? Because this has been the traditional route for invading fascist
forces into Russia, and in the last world war they lost over 22 million people.
And many of the Ukrainian elite are fascists. Whilst this fact does not make it
sensible for Russia to make Ukraine or any other nation an unwilling satellite
of Russia, or justify it, whether Russia is capitalist or socialist, it helps
explain the conflict.
But the EU is deliberately
deaf to this argument, capitalism west, east, and south is currently suffering
inflation, and this is dangerous for it because it plainly shows the flaws in its
beloved economic system. So, the western ruling class media has it that the
cause of this severe economic malady is the war, and what caused this unfortunate
outcome is evil people like Putin. This neatly turns reality on its head – because
capitalist inflation, imperialist expansion, and economic crisis is generating these
conflicts. This must of course be kept hidden lest people start to blame the
ruling classes.
We have been here
before, in the late 1930s. On this history, however, there is now a battle
going on for how to remember it, as there would be. The effort of the far
right, aided and abetted by the neo-liberals and capitalist globalists, is to use
their media to describe communists as the perpetrators of the Holocaust, the German
Nazi’s as the unsung heroes of the war, defeated unjustly, and liberals as the
unwitting idiots who made the mistake of appeasing socialism. As the far right
becomes more acceptable by the media state apparatuses, this, seemingly ridiculous,
interpretation of history, becomes ever more the norm.