Toronto Police Arrest Palestine Activists, Should Target Heather Reisman
by Yves Engler / November 27th, 2023
Aggressive pre-dawn police raids on homes and charging individuals with hate crimes for posting social justice messages is legal overreach at best and “thought crimes” reflecting creeping fascism at worst.
Truth is Heather Reisman, not those putting up posters, is the one who should have been charged with breaking Canadian law.
Between 4:30 and 6 am Wednesday Toronto police raided the residences of seven individuals alleged to have been involved in putting posters and fake blood on an Indigo bookstore on November 10. According to a summary of the police operation posted by World Beyond War, eight or more officers participated in each raid. Police knocked and quickly burst through doors, often without properly identifying themselves. All residents in the houses were handcuffed, including some elderly family members and parents in view of their children. Doors were broken and the police confiscated laptops and cellphones, including some provided by employers. Some of those charged were kept handcuffed in the back of police cars for hours.
This large, coordinated, police operation was a response to political messages put on an Indigo storefront downtown. The posters were photos of the book store’s high-profile CEO Heather Reisman with the statement “Funding Genocide”. Store staff removed the posters and fake blood with little difficulty.
The political stunt was a response to Reisman and her billionaire husband donating around $100 million to a charity they established to assist non-Israelis join that country’s military. Those promoting Israel’s genocide in Gaza panicked. Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center CEO Michael Leavitt posted: “An absolutely appalling antisemitic attack in downtown Toronto, targeting Chapters Indigo and Jewish CEO Heather Reisman.” While the media largely echoed Leavitt’s perspective, a few outlets at least offered context on why Reisman was targeted.
In 2005 Reisman and her husband established the HESEG Foundation for Lone Soldiers “to recognize and honor the contribution of Lone Soldiers to Israel.” Heseg Foundation provides scholarships and other forms of support to Torontonians, New Yorkers and other non-Israelis (Lone Soldiers) who join the IDF. For the IDF high command — the Heseg board has included a handful of top military officials — “lone soldiers” are of value beyond their military capacities. Foreigners volunteering to fight for Israel are a powerful symbol to pressure/reassure Israelis weary of their country’s violent behaviour. At the first Heseg Foundation Grants Awards Ceremony in 2005 Israeli Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz said that “Encouraging and supporting young individuals from abroad” to become lone soldiers “directly supports the morale of the IDF”.
After the IDF killed 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza during operation Cast Lead in 2009 Heseg delivered $160,000 in gifts to IDF soldiers who took part in the violence.
More recently, Heseg has funded scholarships for members of the Duvdevan, an undercover commando unit known for disguising itself and blending in with Palestinians in the Occupied Territories to carry out operations. The Duvdevan scholarships are partly based on “excellence during army service”, which likely means kidnapping or killing Palestinians.
HESEG’s operations almost certainly violate Canada Revenue Agency rules for registered charities. CRA rules state that “increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of Canada’s armed forces is charitable, but supporting the armed forces of another country is not.”
Despite CRA rules, Reisman and Schwartz have received tens of millions of dollars in tax credits for donations to their charity. This abuse of the public purse is far more dubious than placing posters on a storefront to raise awareness of a wealthy individual’s assistance to a murderous foreign military.
While the social cost of taxpayers illegally subsidizing Reisman’s charity are much greater than anything people putting up posters did, at least Toronto police can rightfully claim that they don’t have jurisdiction over a matter the CRA is responsible for. But HESEG’s role in inducing Canadians to join the Israeli military may violate Canada’s Foreign Enlistment Act, which the Toronto police should enforce. According to the act, “any person who, within Canada, recruits or otherwise induces any person or body of persons to enlist or to accept any commission or engagement in the armed forces of any foreign state or other armed forces operating in that state is guilty of an offence.”
So, can we expect an upcoming early morning police raid on Heather Reisman’s Rosedale mansion handcuffing everyone, taking her personal devices and detaining her for inducing people to join a foreign military that has just killed 15,000 human beings in Gaza?
Only if Canada was indeed a state that upheld the rule of law, equally for all.
As Americans tucked into their Thanksgiving Day turkeys, Ireland was rocked by its first ever mass stabbing of children exiting a Dublin kindergarten school, which was followed only hours later by the worst riots Dublin has witnessed since Sinn Féin’s 1981 betrayals of the H Block hunger strikers. On hearing the news as it unfolded, I surmised it was either a heroin addict, a family issue or one of the countless undocumented foreigners the Irish government has flooded the country with as part of NATO’s efforts to turn all of western Europe into a war-compliant wasteland. As the alleged culprit, who was beaten within an inch of his worthless life by Brazilians and other praise worthy passers by, seems to be a middle aged Algerian man, a mixture of all three of those reasons may still be to blame. As central Dublin is awash with all three types of flotsam, do yourself a favour and scrub visiting it; it is, as the American and allied embassies have warned, simply too dangerous and too expensive to be worth the effort.
Horrific as all those attacks on innocent Irish children and adults were, in shades of the CIA’s Black Lives Matter front group, this most recent outrage against Dublin children was quickly overshadowed by the ensuing riots and looting that will cost tens of millions of euros to put some way to rights.
As the heaviest rioting occurred near the General Post Office (GPO), from where the iconic 1916 Rebellion was directed (and beside which adult males have recently been gang raped), thыщсшese latter events afford this article an excellent opportunity to assess revolutionary Ireland’s past, present and future.
The first relevant thing to note about 1916 is that James Connolly, the head of the GPO garrison, ordered his troops not only to fire on the rioters and looters of his day but to shoot to kill. The next thing to note about Connolly is that he imagined, in his absolute innocence and ignorance of events in Europe, that the Britis
h would not bring their heavy guns to bear on his adopted city. The British gunboat Helga, which levelled much of the GPO and its surrounds, quickly put him to rights on that score.
Such historical idiosyncrasies are important to mention as they show that, even during those golden revolutionary years Yeats’ indomitable Irishry, despite their Labour syndicalism, agrarian Fenianism and their robust Catholicism, had not the faintest clue where they were going politically. Although Sinn Féin opportunists reaped most of the political dividends from those years, what really tipped the scales in their favour were the sobering reports emanating from the Somme and other notorious Great War slaughter houses, as well as the solid protest votes in election after rigged election of the unbowed Irish that followed.
Whatever good came out of that revolutionary struggle was quickly lost in the MI6-instigated Civil War that followed, where the victors, backed to the hilt by MI6’s Anglican cult, had to make the best of a very bad lot. The country was in ruin and the Anglicans and their henchmen still controlled the main industries of beer, bullocks, bread and biscuits, as well as Trinity College, the Irish Times, the Bank of Ireland and the country’s other key nodes of influence, which continue to serve King, Country and NATO Empire to this day.
Whatever upward mobility existed was due almost in its entirety to the sacrifices of generations of male and female Catholic religious, who were used as more or less free labour by the incoming regime to train a largely ungrateful peasantry, who idolised their secular leaders just as a Slavic serf might have slobbered over his own master a century earlier. Although successive governments had some successes, most notably in forming semi-state bodies and in housing to clear the country’s notorious slums, it was very much an uphill battle to survive in the cut and thrust of international commerce.
Although much could be written about the past, the present is an economy that lurches from one election to the other, where American owned pharmaceutical and hi tech companies drive the economy, where accommodation must be made for all of those refugees and pretend refugees America wants to colonise us with and where those who seek to milk the fruits of office must be slaves to Uncle Sam. Thus, as high tax rates and higher property prices drive young, aspiring Irish couples to seek their fortunes in America, Dubai or far away Australia, Slovakian, Algerian and Kurdish criminal groups flow into the country in unsustainable numbers. The government, parroting the lines their EU and NATO bosses feed them, cackle that having these hordes of killers and loafers in our midst is our strength.
Although the rioters, if they could formulate a coherent sentence, would argue that all this immigration is stifling the Irish, it is also stifling hard working immigrants, who must work all the hours God sends them just to pay the extortionate rents they must pay for the right to live here. But then, they too, are just lambs to the slaughter, here to fatten the Americans the local political and other collaborators who surrendered this country and all there in to them so slavishly serve.
On that latter point, Ireland’s comprador radical left sicken me to the hilt. Not only, for example, are they not the radical pro-Palestinians they claim to be but they work in collusion with the Americans and their puppets to further the interests of America and her allies. This can be seen where these scumbags have been active collaborators in NATO’s wars against both Syria and Russia and where their MPs actively opposed a motion condemning the slaughter of Shia children in Syria by Irish-based ISIS “activists”. When it comes to international solidarity, the job of those groups is to divide, conquer and emasculate on behalf of their American masters any support there may be for the genuine victims of U.S. terror in Syria, Libya or Ukraine. In that, they are no different from their equivalents in Britain or anywhere else, who all march to the same NATO drum.
So, to look at recent events in Dublin from a longer historical perspective, although the 1916 Rebellion was a work of aesthetic vandalism, its proponents would rightly or wrongly argue that, unlike Hitler’s spiteful Is Paris Burning? question to General von Choltitz, there was method in their particular form of madness. But no such reasoning can be put forward to defend this more recent rioting and looting, which has been blamed on a phantom far right, which is as much a creation of MI6’s media as it is of reality. The looting was the latest in a series of nihilistic protests which dominated last winter’s news cycle. Not only has the Irish regime, working on behalf of its NATO paymaster, put tens of thousands of males of military age into communities up and down the country, but they have the full backing of Sinn Féin and all the other pro-American pretend radical groups to do that. The job of these hooligans is to demonise and make toxic all opposition to this ongoing trend. Like the left and the centre, they have no politics, no direction and no brains beyond what any other rioter, football hooligan or opportunist low life criminal elsewhere might have.
Here, to conclude, is the loathsome Sky News Australia with the equally loathsome Douglas Murray making excuses for these no less loathsome Irish criminals. When such slugs as those are on your side, you can be sure MI6, the CIA and ASIO are playing you for the fool that you are. Because the only way to escape their wiles is to have a coherent, broad based, informed, educated and motivated coalition, NATO know that, as long as they can continue to throw up these nihilistic Pied Pipers to divert the masses, their empire and all the riches that flow to them from it will not be under threat in Ireland or any similar backwater.
The Magician steps onto the stage, his black cloak swirling about him. Centre stage, he flourishes his hat: It is empty. He punches it lightly to demonstrate its solidity. The Magician then picks up certain objects and places them into his hat. Into it goes AnsarAllah’s seizure of an Israeli-owned vessel (the situation is being ‘monitored’); into it goes the Iraqi strikes on U.S. bases (barely noticed by the main-stream media); into it too go the 1,000 missiles fired into northern Israel by Hizbullah; into it goes the hot war in the West Bank. The Magician turns to the audience – the hat is empty. But the audience knows those objects have a physical reality, but somehow they are magically obfuscated.
It is in this way that the western main-stream media maintains deterrence by playing down the state of war through what Malcom Kyeyune describes as “a simulacrum of peace” – of a gently subsiding conflict and the quieting deployment of (paraphrasing Kyeyune) a very “post-modern question”: What exactly is the meaning of civilian ‘non-combatant’ anyway?
One aspect to the image of easing conflict is the hostage exchange that has been agreed. It is both real, and at the same time it underpins the simulacrum that once Hamas is annihilated, and the hostages released, then the problem of 2.3 million Palestinians can go into the magician’s hat, and be eased from sight. For some, the hope is sincere and well intentioned – that once the fighting ceases, it will stay ceased, and that an end to the bombardment in Gaza might open a window to some political ‘solution’ – if it can be extended sine dei.
‘Solution’ being here but a polite word for the EU’s attempted bribery of Egypt and Jordan. Reportedly, the EU President, Ursula von der Leyen, visited Egypt and Israel to present them with financial offers ($10bn for Egypt and $5bn for Jordan), in exchange for the dispersal of the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip elsewhere – effectively to facilitate the evacuation of the Palestinian population from the Strip in line with Israel’s aims of ethnically-cleansing Gaza.
However, former minister Ayalet Shaked’s tweet – “After we turn Khan Yunis into a soccer field, we need to tell the countries that each of them take a quota: We need all 2 million to leave. That’s the solution to Gaza” – is but one by senior Israeli political and security figures extoling what Israel increasingly sees as the “solution” for Gaza.
But by being so explicit, Shaked likely has torpedoed Von der Leyen’s initiative – for no Arab state wants to be complicit in a new Nakba.
A Hudna or ‘time out’ inevitably is highly precarious. In the 2014 fighting, when IDF forces initiated military sweeps in Gaza after a ceasefire had begun, it led to a fire-fight and the collapse of the cease-fire. The fighting continued for another full month.
Two key lessons that I learnt from trying to initiate truces on behalf of the EU during the Second Intifada were that a ‘truce is a truce’ and only that – both sides use it to reposition themselves for the next round of fighting. And secondly, that ‘quiet’ in one confined locality does not spread de-escalation to another geographically separate locality; but rather, that one outbreak of egregious violence is virally contagious, and spreads geographically instantly.
The present hostage exchange is centred on Gaza. However, Israel has three fronts of hot conflict open (Gaza, its northern border with Lebanon, and in the West Bank). An incident occurring in any one of the three fronts may be enough to collapse confidence in the Gaza understandings and re-launch Israel’s assault on Gaza.
On the eve of the truce, by way of example, Israeli forces heavily bombed both Syria and Lebanon. Seven Hizbullah fighters were killed.
The point here, plainly said, is that the historical precedents of Hudnas leading to political openings are not that great. A hostage release, per se, resolves nothing. The issue in the present crisis runs far deeper. When, ‘once upon a time’, Britain promised the Jews a homeland, western powers also (in 1947) promised Palestinians a state, but never took it to implementation. This lacuna ultimately is culminating in a head-on train crash.
The Israeli Cabinet’s ambition for a Jewish State on the biblical lands of Israel simply is intended to block any Palestinian State from emerging either in part of Jerusalem, or elsewhere in historic Palestine. In this context, Hamas’ actions were precisely intended to break this impasse and the endless paradigm of fruitless ‘negotiations’.
Unsurprisingly, Israel’s Defence Minister already has announced Israel’s intention to renew fighting immediately after the end of the cease-fire. Israeli officials have been telling their U.S. counterparts that they anticipate several more weeks of operations in the north of the Strip, before shifting focus to the south.
Thus far, the IDF has been operating in areas close to the shoreline in Gaza, and in places, such as the Wadi, south of Gaza City, where the subsoil does not facilitate the building of tunnels. These are the areas, therefore, where Hamas does not have significant defensive capabilities. Should military action be renewed, the IDF is likely to move away from the northern coastline towards the Gaza City epicentre, allowing Hamas to manoeuvre more easily, and inflict greater losses on the IDF and their armoured vehicles. In this sense – away from the simulacra – the war is just beginning.
Prime Minister Netanyahu has been described both in Israel and in the western MSM as a ‘dead man walking’ in political terms. Be that as it may, Netanyahu has his strategy: He has openly defied the Biden Team on every war-related issue, except that of eradicating Hamas.
During a press conference last Sunday, Netanyahu touted a “diplomatic Iron Dome”, saying he would not give in to “increasingly heavy pressure … used against us in recent weeks … I reject these pressures and say to the world: We will continue to fight until victory — until we destroy Hamas and bring our hostages back home”.
Yonatan Freeman, from the Hebrew University, perceives the gambit in Netanyahu’s vague statements: He defies Team Biden, yet takes care to leave sufficient ‘wiggle room’ so that he can always blame Biden, whenever he is ‘forced’ by America into some reversal.
The Israeli Cabinet’s strategy, therefore, rests on the big bet that Israeli public opinion will hold – despite Netayahu’s personal disapproval ratings – due to the overwhelming public support at this point for the two declared objects set by the War Cabinet: Destroying the ‘Hamas regime’ and its capabilities, and the release of all Israeli hostages.
At its core, ‘the bet’ lies in the conviction that public sentiment – contextualised deliberately by the Israeli cabinet in absolute Manichean terms (light versus the dark; civilisation versus barbarism; all Gazans being complicit with ‘Hamas’ evil’) – will ultimately arouse a wave of support for the further move of taking “the fiction” of a Palestinian state off the table “once and for all”. The table is being set for a long war against ‘cosmic evil’.
The ‘solution’, as National Security Minister Smotrich and his allies underline, is to offer Palestinians a choice – ‘to renounce their national aspirations and continue living on their land in an inferior status’, or to emigrate abroad. Put bluntly, the ‘solution’ is the removal of all non-subservient Palestinians from the lands of Greater Israel.
Turning now to the contending perspective:
The ‘united axis’ supporting Palestinians observe that Israel continues to adhere to its initial military goals of destroying Gaza to the point where there is nothing left – no civilian infrastructure at all – by which Gazans might live, were they even to try to return to their collapsed homes.
They see this Israeli objective fully supported by Biden when his spokesman said:
“We believe that they have the right to [embark on further combat operations in Gaza]; but [such actions] … should include greater and enhanced protections for civilian life”.
Regional security commentator, Hasan Illaik, notes,
“Axis officials also believe that conciliatory-sounding U.S. statements, which sometimes suggest that a de-escalation phase is imminent, are nothing but an effort to repair a public image heavily damaged by unstinting U.S. support for Israel’s continuing massacre of Palestinians in Gaza”.
So, is Israel, supported by Team Biden and some EU leaders, winning?
Tom Friedman – an intimate of Team Biden – wrote in the New York Times on 9 November – after traveling around Israel and the West Bank:
“I now understand why so much has changed. It is crystal clear to me that Israel is in real danger — more danger than at any other time since its War of Independence in 1948”.
Far-fetched? Possibly not.
Back in 2012, U.S. author Michael Greer wrote that Israel was founded at a particular propitious time, despite being surrounded by hostile neighbours:
“Several of the major Western powers supported the new state with significant financial and military aid; of at least equal importance, members of the religious community responsible for creating the new state, who remained back in those same Western nations, engaged in vigorous fundraising efforts to support the new state, and equally vigorous political efforts to get existing governmental support maintained or increased. The resources thus made available to the new state gave it a substantial military edge against its hostile neighbours, and its existence became enough of a fait accompli that some of its neighbours backed away from a wholly confrontational stance”.
“Still, the state’s survival depended on three things. The first, and by far the most crucial, was the ongoing flow of support from the Western powers to pay for a military establishment far larger than the economic and natural resources of the territory in question would permit. The second was the continued fragmentation and relative weakness of the surrounding states. The third was the maintenance of internal peace within the state and of collective assent to a clear sense of priorities, so that it could respond with its full force to threats from outside – instead of squandering its limited resources on civil strife or popular projects that contributed nothing to its survival”.
“In the long run, none of these three conditions could be met indefinitely … When it happens that these early patterns of support break down, Israel may find itself backed into a corner”.
“You might think a Presidential visit, presidential speech, three Secretary of State visits, two Secretary of Defence visits, the dispatching of two aircraft carrier groups, a nuclear submarine and Marine expeditionary unit, and the pledge of $14.3 billion in emergency military aid, are testament to the unwavering support the U.S. is extending to Israel” …
“Think again”.
“Underneath the full and robust backing of the Biden administration, there are dangerous and treacherous currents that are chipping away and encroaching on public sympathy for Israel across the United States. Polls released last week contained the most alarming and telling data: Public support for Israel is cratering – particularly amongst the 18 – 34 age group. Another poll shows that 36% of Americans say they oppose additional funding for Ukraine and Israel: Support for funding Israel, only – was at 14%”.
What is truly remarkable is that the leaders of the new narratives are the youth of Generation Z, Y, and Alpha. Leveraging social media, and speaking directly to their peer groups, they have conveyed the grievances of the Palestinians to the world. Many had limited knowledge of Palestine, but their unfiltered sense of justice fuelled their collective anger against Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Greer’s second and third conditions for Israel’s survival also are metastasizing as the global tectonic plates grind and move: Non-western powers are not siding with Israel. They are coalescing in opposition to the Israeli Cabinet’s aspiration to end the notion of a Palestinian State, once and for all. And today, Israel is bitterly divided on the vision for its future; what it is exactly that constitutes ‘Israel’ and even that very post-modern question, ‘what it is to beJewish
At the end of October, the president of the EU parliament Roberta Metsola was asked by a journalist whether the EU would formally open Ukraine and Moldova’s accession talks after granting candidate status to these countries in 2022.
“If a country looks to Europe, then Europe should fling its doors wide open. Enlargement has always been the European Union’s strongest geopolitical tool.”
Though Metsola simply rephrased statements made by the head of the European Commission Ursula Von der Leyen and by the president of the European Council Charles Michel, her word choice offers an excellent insight into the ideological underpinnings of EU expansionism.
Metsola conflates Europe and the European Union, but this is not simply a slip of the tongue, Brussels has a long tradition of assuming that the EU equals Europe and countries lying outside its borders are not truly European, otherwise they wouldn’t be ‘looking to Europe’. To become European is to become ‘civilized’ since outside the ‘garden of Europe’ people live in a ‘jungle’, at least according to EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell. The EU, posited as the embodiment of superior values, has a moral duty to open its doors and admit those unfortunate countries that are currently locked out of this garden of delights, and by doing so, rescue them from some unspecified danger. Basically a variation on the colonial theme of the white saviour. Then Metsola offers the decisive argument in support of enlargement: well, duh, it’s a geopolitical tool to make the EU stronger.
Whether enlargement would make the bloc stronger as its proponents claim or, on the contrary, accelerate its implosion, has divided opinions for two decades. Metsola conveniently forgets to mention that without unanimous agreement accession talks can’t even be started, but of course Eurocrats can’t let facts get in the way of a good narrative.
The metaphors used by Metsola (the door) and Borrell (garden/jungle) reinforce the spatial dichotomy inside/outside that culturally reflects the opposition between positive and negative values, civilization and barbarism. Without a ‘chaotic’ external sphere, actual or imagined, the internal structure wouldn’t appear orderly, actually it wouldn’t appear at all: figure and background would blend in a continuum. Positing the existence of a dangerous jungle inhabited by barbarians is essential to maintain the illusion of order and civility inside. Problem is, at each round of enlargement the entropy of the system increases. History has shown that when imperial expansion is attempted without the necessary preconditions — a sufficiently strong military and an economy capable of sustaining it, an effective leadership, an ideology that spurs the desire for empire, and healthy institutional ties between the core and the periphery — the result is inevitably overreach, failure and defeat. But don’t ask our eunuchs about empires, especially the overstretched one they serve. They believe their own propaganda and are committed to “protecting, promoting and projecting European values, defending democracy and human rights in the interest of the common, public good. Fostering stability and prosperity in the world, protecting a rules-based world order, is a basic precondition for protection of the Union’s values.” When it comes to EU statements parody is unncessary, the original achieves the same comedic effect.
Whether further expansion is good or bad for the EU has become the modern equivalent of the old Byzantine discussion over the sex of angels, and while no agreement can be reached, the process has largely stalled after the biggest wave of new members joined in 2004 and Croatia in 2013. So why has it topped the agenda of so many Eurocrats in the last two years? Mainly because supporters of expansion hoped that they could leverage on the unity that the EU mustered vis-à-vis the conflict in Ukraine to push through a proxy imperialist project fuelled by Washington’s magical thinking. The cornerstone of this project was the full capture of Ukraine whose NATO-trained army should have dealt a decisive blow to Russia. As we know, things aren’t exactly going to plan and that unity of purpose now seems as precarious as Ukraine’s future.
Ukraine had been promised EU candidate status for years and finally received it in return for a blood sacrifice. Obviously it doesn’t qualify for membership, and the prospect of sitting in a crowded waiting room with other candidates for the foreseeable future isn’t exactly worth dying for. Brussels has to first find and then dangle a more appealing carrot at a time when opinion polls show that support for Ukraine is waning.
After coming to the defence of the US ‘rules-based-order’ the EU has a bag full of IOUs, a weakened economy, and Borrell’s garden of earthly delights increasingly resembles the dark panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s famous triptych.
One may think that discussing EU enlargement while the bloc faces major crises that are stress-testing it to break-point is the epitome of insanity. Actually some commentators have already drawn parallels between the EU’s leadership and Nero fiddling as Rome burned. But allegedly Nero did something else besides fiddling, he blamed Christians for the fire. Offering an enemy within or an enemy without, is a tried and tested tactic to crush dissent and consolidate power. And that is exactly what Germany’s foreign minister Annalena Baerbock tried at a recent conference in Berlin dedicated to EU enlargement. She told 17 foreign ministers from EU and candidate countries, including Ukraine’s Dmytro Kuleba, that the EU must expand to avoid making everyone vulnerable.
“Putin’s Moscow will continue to try to divide not only Ukraine from us, but also Moldova, Georgia and the Western Balkans. If these countries can be permanently destabilised by Russia, then that also makes us vulnerable. We can no longer afford grey areas in Europe”. Whatever happened to promises of economic growth, investments and access to a wealthy market? As they all sound pretty hollow in 2023, Baerbock invokes the bogeyman. Gone is all pretence that the EU and NATO pursue different strategies.
With the door to NATO closed to Ukraine and Washington shifting its focus to the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific, the burden of supporting Ukraine “to defend Europe” has been dumped on the EU.
If painting Russia as a threat has long been used by the US to keep NATO alive, in more recent years it has been exploited to unify the foreign and defense policy of EU member states. Washington promoted and facilitated a vertical consolidation of power in the EU in order to outsource to Brussels some of the policing and punitive functions that enable its global capital accumulation and underpin its hegemony. According to its calculus, dealing with one collective vassal, the EU, would be easier than managing several squabbling and competing European vassals. This strategy reflects Washington’s poor grasp of Europe’s history and complexity and that’s why it is unlikely to produce the desired results, especially since European interests were sacrificed at the altar of American ones. After siphoning off wealth from EU countries and restricting their room for manoeuvre, the pie has shrunk and it’s only natural that the scramble to get a slice will intensify. Looting and cannibalizing your allies isn’t exactly a smart move, it reeks of desperation and is a clear sign that the US is financially and militarily overextended.
The economic and industrial decline in EU countries now seems unarrestable. It couldn’t be otherwise when you are trapped in an abusive and exploitative relationship that denies you the freedom to choose your friends and business partners. The economic and geopolitical centre of gravity has moved eastward, the unipolar world order that emerged in the 1990s is unravelling and a new multipolar order is taking shape before our eyes. Instead of following the pragmatic path of Eurasian integration and bolstering mutually beneficial economic ties with China and Russia, the EU has embarked on a suicide mission for its curators in Washington in the doomed attempt to weaken Russia and contain China.
For years the EU had been allowed to benefit from the US-led globalization drive; it developed trade relations and multilateral cooperation with neighbouring countries and the rest of the world. The US rather than accept the emergence of a new multipolar reality, chose to reverse globalization and split the world into two blocs, creatively framing the competition as an ideological confrontation between democracy and autocracy. Trade protectionism increased, international investments were subjected to heightened scrutiny on national security grounds, data-flow restrictions proliferated, sanctions became the norm.
After being condemned to geopolitical irrelevance, European countries are called upon to foot the bill of US imperial ambitions and provide military assistance. A report published by the RAND corporation in November acknowledged that the US defence strategy and posture have become insolvent and recommended a different approach: “The tasks that the U.S. government and its citizens expect their military forces and other elements of national power to do internationally greatly exceed the means available to accomplish those tasks.
The United States cannot and should not on its own attempt to develop the requisite operational concepts, postures, and capabilities required to realize this new approach to defeating aggression. The imperative for allied and partner participation is about more than just generating the resources needed for a credible combined defense. Because deterrence is about more than raw military power, solidarity among the leading democratically governed nations is required in diplomatic and economic dimensions as well. And closer cooperation and interdependence in the defense arena will have beneficial spillover effects in other areas, helping facilitate coordinated action to meet common challenges.”
To better assist the moribund hegemon, the EU is being told to enlarge and reform. Actually reform is deemed even more urgent than enlargement because the US fears that the EU’s ability to carry out the prescribed task might be undermined by a handful of countries exercising their veto power. At the centre of the conversation is the EU’s unanimity rule, which means every country must agree before the bloc can make a decision on issues such as foreign policy, assistance to Ukraine or tax rules.
It is no coincidence that the loudest arguments in favour of EU expansion and majority vote in lieu of unanimity are being heard in Atlanticist circles. Washington needs to strengthen control over Europe’s foreign and security policies and that’s why it has intensified pressure on France and Germany, as well as other European states that are resisting the prospect of Ukraine, Moldova and West Balkan states joining the club in the future.
The capture of Europe
In the kind of EU that Paris and Berlin dreamed of 30 years ago, Baltic and Eastern European countries would provide cheap land and labour, and new untapped markets for their companies — the ideal Lebensraum for ambitious, enterprising Western Europeans. This neocolonial scenario would be assisted by cultural imperialism and facilitated by geographical proximity.
But in the post-Cold war euphoria the Franco-German tandem didn’t pay attention to the Stone Guest: the expansion of NATO was proceeding at a much faster pace than the enlargement of the EU. Despite the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, NATO hadn’t been disbanded, if anything its mission “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down” had been given new impetus after NATO welcomed states whose new political elites had been groomed exactly for that mission.
Not only would the Americans call the shots louder than before, they could count on more allies to do exactly that. As new member states joined the EU, their anti-Russian sentiment also started playing a disproportionate role in shaping EU relations with Russia. As a matter of fact, Russophobia was actively cultivated in post-Soviet states to prop up fragile, and in some cases totally artificial, national identities, and lend legitimacy to new rulers.
In order to glue together new and old members and attract more candidates, the EU turned political problems into technocratic ones, relied on legal procedures and allocated or withdrew financial resources to impose its ‘vision’, became an ideational actor and a ‘global teacher’ of neoliberal principles, Western ‘values’ and EU standards. To conceal its anti-democratic nature and legitimize an invasive bureaucratic apparatus completely disembedded from the wider society, the EU turned into a giant PR machine that drained resources to project moral authority and keep up appearances.
Lacking democratic legitimacy, the EU had to invest considerable resources in creating a simulacrum of democracy. Lacking a demos, it had to invent one through a ‘civilizing mission’ that was undertaken with missionary zeal. In order to create the new ‘European demos’, national, cultural and religious identities had to be diluted first (or artificially inflated where they served an anti-Russian function), one step at a time, starting from kindergarten, and then replaced by some woke ersatz provided by the likes of the WEF and Open Society Foundations — the social engineering path to civilization!
One should bear in mind that the EU is neither an independent geopolitical actor, nor a ‘geopolitical power’, regardless of what Borrell or Von der Leyen rave about. The EU was created to drain power away from member states, erode their sovereignty, so that they will never become a challenge to US interests and power. As a result, the EU isn’t greater than the sum of its parts, it’s the geopolitical equivalent of a black hole. Its institutional architecture, an intricate network of talking shops, is so mind-boggling and mind-numbing that Henry Kissinger, when he was US Secretary of State, famously quipped “Who do I call if I want to call Europe?”
Neither an international organisation nor a nation state, the EU can be described as an artificial supranational polity. This takes the form of numerous mutually penetrating networks of social, economic, political, ideological interconnections which include, at different levels and stages, supranational mechanisms, national governments, regional administrations, multinational corporations, and interest groups whose reach is international.
So when we talk about the EU we should remember that it is run like a private club for a cluster of transatlantic corporations and financial elites. Their lobbies and think tanks control the knowledge and information that shape public opinion and that figureheads act upon — EU leaders are invariably failed politicians and mediocrities whose political careers were facilitated by the same lobbies that own them and dictate their agenda.
As these transatlantic elites engage in a global struggle to maintain and increase their power, seize and control resources, from digital data to natural resources, they form cartels when their interests coincide, or compete for political influence when their interests diverge. The ‘culture wars’ that have made rational debate virtually impossible in the West are often fuelled by these elites as they have the means to mobilize political resources — people, votes and parties — around certain positions on cultural issues.
The European integration process is an imperialist project both in the sense of the relation of the EU to the rest of the imperialist chain, but also inside the EU in the uneven relations between the different countries.
The signs of a deep crisis of European integration have multiplied, Brexit being the most obvious but not the only example. The growing crisis of legitimacy is also exemplified in the reaction of voters in EU countries. Contrary to the accusations of ‘populism’ and ‘nationalism’ addressed to anyone who is critical of European integration, what emerges is rather the anxiety caused by people’s sense of a lack of control over their own lives, disbelief against the undemocratic institutional and political framework of the EU.
Since living standards continue to drop and promises of prosperity and social welfare in the European garden are largely unmet, dissatisfaction and dissent are rising, and not only among ordinary people. Some national elites have become more restive too because they are penalized by the EU hostility against Russia, and increasingly China. EU’s potential for economic growth has been exhausted and the majority of the bloc’s members suffer from chronic budget deficiency and excessive state debt.
But since the US needs all hands on deck to prop up its rapidly waning hegemony, the EU doubled down on its role of enforcer of the US rules by interweaving NATO and the EU into an architecture of control and propaganda — hybrid warfare has been unleashed against the European population under the guise of defending it from Russian disinformation. In such a context more resources are being diverted to the defence and security budget, and to US proxies such as Ukraine. No matter how you spin it, it is obvious that only a handful of well-connected companies benefit from an increase in member states’ military expenditure and R&D.
The Covid-19 emergency offered the US the perfect opportunity to check if all its European ducks were in a row. For the first time in its history the EU adopted a joint procurement strategy: the joint procurement of vaccines not only tested cohesion, coordination, the ability to ‘act quickly’ and mobilize financial resources, it constituted a precedent that later facilitated the joint procurement of weapons for Ukraine and the imposition of sanctions on Russia. The exclusion of Russian and Chinese vaccines showed that the EU could be trusted to obey orders even if they conflicted with its economic interests — US mRNA vaccines were more expensive than the alternative and relied on a technology whose safety hadn’t been proven. The EU media and political debates deployed the language of warfare by referring to a ‘war’ against Covid-19, the virus was ‘fought back’, medics and paramedics were described as ‘front-line soldiers’. A cognitive metaphor of war helped structure the perception of reality. The state of exception was normalized, leading to the suspension of constitutional rights. The pandemic offered the pretext to carry out the most far-reaching psychological operation ever attempted in peace time: any public display of dissent or non-compliance with nonsensical rules was harshly repressed, media and social media were weaponized to brainwash and censor the public, the capacity of the EU new army of ‘fact-checkers’ was boosted and the scope of digital surveillance was extended. Lockdowns led to huge economic losses (and gains for a handful of mostly American tech and pharma companies) but also to a paradigm shift in the EU fiscal, monetary and investment policies, notably through the adaptation of State aid to allow member states to support their economies by means of more direct intervention. It signalled a break from the austerity policy adopted after the financial crisis of 2008. As states became more indebted they had to cede even more sovereignty to the EU: the development strategies and goals of member states had to align with priorities set by the EU and mainly benefitting the US. The debt trap was presented as a recovery plan with high-sounding names such as Next Generation EU (NGEU) — €360 billion in loans and €390 billion in grants.
As they say, never let a crisis go to waste. An emergency creates a sense of urgency and the need to act quickly, which seriously reduces the ability to think carefully. This approach paved the way for the acceptance of even greater losses later, when the EU imposed sanctions on Russia that turned into a boomerang. Any hesitation to give up Russian gas was promptly preempted by its American ‘partner’ through the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines.
Eurocrats who love being loved, especially the pay-to-play manifestation of love, are now kept on a shorter leash. It is estimated that there are around 30,000 registered lobbyists in Brussels and they have been spreading love for decades. But in more recent times only US-vetted lobbyists have been granted free rein. It appears that the arrests that followed the Qatargate were a warning to eurocrats: accepting bribes from certain foreign actors like Qatar will no longer be tolerated. Transatlantic interests must always come first.
EU enlargement — cui prodest?
Though expansion has been enshrined in EU official documents as a geo-strategic imperative, the EU is now facing far bigger challenges than it did in the post-Cold War years. In the early Noughties, European leaders discussed whether to enlarge the union, absorbing Eastern bloc countries, or to deepen its integration. They tried both and the result is an unsustainable mess according to all socio-economic indicators, even before you factor in the mind-blowing cost of supporting Ukraine, the loss of affordable energy resources from Russia and boomerang sanctions.
Think tanks, eurocrats and the media have recently increased their efforts to spin past examples of EU enlargement as a success and future enlargement as an opportunity, but outside their echo chambers scepticism is growing and enlargement fatigue has set in.
If enlargement is being discussed is because talk is cheap. Ask North Macedonia, a country that was granted candidate status in 2005 and is still on the waiting list. The application of Ukraine and Moldova was hastily accepted in 2022 to dangle a carrot in front of them, knowing perfectly well that neither country meets criteria to join the union. Besides, it’s still better for the EU to keep them on the hook, never sealing the deal. Nine countries were formally made the same promise, and you can’t fast track Ukraine and Moldova’s accession without causing resentment.
But as Washington fears that ‘politically and economically vulnerable countries’ would lose patience with the EU, and find more attractive partners to support their development, namely China and Russia, the EU has to keep making promises and most crucially, bankroll political elites in neighbouring countries to bolster their power and clientele. The US is also counting on the EU to fund Ukraine’s war efforts and the reconstruction of whatever will be left of this failed country when the military conflict ends. Let European taxpayers pick up the bill: the EU’s support to the Kiev regime has now reached €85 billion and Von der Leyen promised more will come. An additional €50 billion for the ‘Ukraine Facility’ was proposed by the European Commission for the years 2024 to 2027. In 2022 the European Parliament had approved €150 million to prop up Moldova’s puppet government.
As the EU cannot expand without imploding, France and Germany invited 12 experts to form a working group on EU institutional reforms. They have come up with a set of proposals for a multi-speed construct that would allow some member states to integrate more deeply in certain areas and prevent others from stopping them. The report proposes to get rid of the requirements for unanimous voting, even if scrapping vetoes entails accepting different levels of commitment. It envisages four tiers of membership, the last two falling outside the EU altogether. These ‘concentric circles’ would include an inner circle whose members could have even closer ties than those that bind the existing EU; the EU itself; associate membership (internal market only); and the looser, less demanding tier of the new European Political Community.
The main ‘advantage’ for the Collective West is that all the countries of this ‘Europe’ will be cut off from Russia and Belarus, but it’s not clear what are the advantages for countries in the outer tier given that they will have limited or no access to the Single Market but are expected to give up part of their own national sovereignty in favour of Brussels, losing autonomy and room for manoeuvre in a multipolar world.
Last October, the European Political Community — a talking shop that includes leaders of EU countries, EU candidates, Switzerland, Norway, the UK, and even Armenia and Azerbaijan — convened in Granada to discuss a potential enlargement of the bloc. The meeting was supposed to strengthen resolve but instead it deepened the reservations of those who never warmed up to the idea of enlarging the EU at the expense of current members. Some members have already done the math and realized that if the proposed EU enlargement goes ahead they will have to pay more to and receive less from the EU budget: net receivers will become net contributors. Understandably they are not too excited at the prospect.
While increased EU-NATO integration and eastward expansion created new powerful lobbies and a new class of ultra-Atlanticist eurocrats, EU member states lost any semblance of strategic autonomy and therefore any chance to protect or advance their economic and geopolitical interests. Initially it was the working class of Southern and Western European countries that bore the brunt of the EU expansion, then the middle class too started to feel the pinch. These days Italy’s GDP per capita has fallen to Mississippi’s level, the poorest state in the US; France’s is a little better, it falls somewhere between Idaho’s and Arkansas’, while Germany’s, the engine of the European economy, matches Oklahoma’s. Not exactly a success story.
Though EU sceptics have become more numerous and vocal in these countries, their political influence is limited. Their adversaries represent the interests of a new political and economic elite that emerged through both the material and symbolic co-constitution of the administrative and bureaucratic apparatus of the EU. This elite, through the apportionment and disbursement of funds, can induce compliance or reward the loyalty of politicians. By controlling the purse strings, it can act as kingmaker in any EU country.
It goes without saying that this elite shares the habitus and neoliberal ideology of transnational elites more at home in London and New York than in Brussels. It would be naive to expect it to defend European interests. As a matter of fact, it doesn’t. The eurozone countries, which 15 years ago had a GDP of a little over thirteen trillion euros, today have increased it by two miserable trillion, while the US has almost doubled its GDP (from 13.8 to 26.9 trillion euros) despite its smaller population. According to the Financial Times, in dollar terms, the European Union economy is now 65% of the United States economy. That’s down from 91% in 2013. American GDP per capita is more than twice that of Europe, and the gap continues to widen. Brilliant work!
If EU leaders are routinely bypassed in favour of national leaders in international negotiations it’s because the EU fits the definition of a paper tiger. The unity shown vis-à-vis the proxy war in Ukraine can’t be sustained for long and its main American and European architects will no longer be in office in a year time. Europe’s political setup militates against a proactive foreign and defence policy. So, when Borrell raves about the need for Europe to turn from a soft power to a hard powerx he conveniently forgets that the EU is not a state actor. It has some of the attributes of statehood — legal personality, some exclusive competences, a diplomatic service and some EU countries have a common currency — but ultimately it is a hybrid and as such is not equipped to play a 19th century ‘great game’ of power politics. And, to be honest, it will not be equipped to do so for many years to come. A ‘geopolitical EU’ remains little more than a consolatory fantasy predicated on its power of attraction — the queue to join.
i EU Parliament chief to Ukraine: You should have ‘observer’ MEPs while you wait to join the bloc — POLITICO
