The Denial of Reality by Narcissistic ‘Democrats’ Takes On Clinical Dimensions
[Print version of this editorial]
Feb. 25—The collective hysteria seizing the neoliberal, vulture globalist trans-Atlantic Establishment—in the face of far-reaching strategic changes manifest in the Trump Presidency and the New Silk Road dynamic—represents a new kind of mass-psychological phenomenon. In a symbiotic conflation of group-think and group-narcissism, these advocates of the oh-so-democratic “western community of values” indulge in diatribes of the basest sort against those who think otherwise, so much so that it doesn’t even occur to them that they are acting dictatorially.
The most dramatic example of this clinical loss of touch with reality is surely the pathological excitement with which every statement by President Trump is commented upon. A recent example is Trump’s Feb. 24 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference at National Harbor in Maryland. He pointed out the obvious, that the United States has spent six trillion dollars or more over the last fifteen years for wars in the Middle East and Libya, and the region is much the worse for it today. If the former presidents had instead gone to the beach during that time, we would all be much better off today, he said, and added that we could have rebuilt our country three times over with that money.
But the media found these views unworthy of comment, and instead hyperventilated over the fact that several of their number, who had previously distinguished themselves with particularly vicious reporting against Trump, were not invited to be part of the White House media pool. And where were these media and their co-thinker politicians, when the Bush and Obama governments—supported by the same “western community of values”—were bombing countries in the Middle East for years, and arming terrorist groups, actions which cost more than a million lives and brought unspeakable suffering to many millions of families, without which the refugee crisis would not have erupted as it has?
Did they simply oppose Trump’s demand that Europe must spend more money for rearmament—because there is no threat, there is no Warsaw Pact any more, and Russia has no plans for conquest, neither of the Baltic states, or Poland, or anywhere else, while NATO and the European Union (EU) have expanded right up to Russia’s borders? No. These media are reacting no less hysterically with demands for the nuclear rearmament of Germany and the European Union. “Does the EU Need the Bomb?” wrote co-authors Peter Dausend and Michael Thumann of the oh-so-liberal Zeit recently; they thus betrayed where the real warmongers reside—namely, in the editorial offices of their newspaper.
The neoliberal, neoconservative Establishment just can’t manage to analyze the failure of its paradigm and correct it accordingly.
Sabotaging the Silk Road
Another example of the absurdity of this behavior is the most recent EU action against the Chinese-financed stretch of high-speed rail between Belgrade and Budapest. This 350 kilometer rail segment, first proposed by President Xi Jinping in 2013, will reduce travel time between the two capitals from 8 to 3 hours and will obviously be very beneficial for the countries concerned, Serbia and Hungary, as well as for the entire Balkan region. But the EU has now launched an investigation into whether the project will pay for itself (!) and whether it conforms to EU guidelines. Yet Serbia is not even a member of the EU!
The people of the Balkan states are painfully aware that the EU has not built a single one of the transport corridors originally decided upon at the conference of EU Transport Ministers in 1994 in Crete, but which then fell victim to the austerity policy of the EU Commission and the European Central Bank. So no one should be surprised that the Central and Eastern European countries, and the Balkan countries, see their future in the expansion of the New Silk Road, China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which opens to them the prospect of participating in the most dynamic and most gigantic infrastructure projects the world has ever seen. Instead of responding positively to China’s many offers of cooperation and seizing the enormous economic opportunities which lie in the win-win cooperation of all of Eurasia, the neoliberal EU bureaucracy is attempting, from a position of weakness, to exert a control which it has long since lost, as the desolate situation of the EU shows.
China’s Global Times wrote this about the EU action on Feb. 23: “The EU is experiencing a tough time and may seek to assert its authority by ramping up inspections and reviews, but the EU may have hit a dead end. It is unknown whose interest the EU’s investigation represents.” Nevertheless, it added, China will try to persuade the EU of the advantages of cooperation.
Less dim-witted is PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the world’s second largest accounting firm, which is based in London and operates in 152 countries, with 756 subsidiaries and 223,000 employees. It published a comprehensive overview under its rubric, “PwC B&R Watch,” under the headline: “China and Belt & Road Infrastructure: 2016 Review and Outlook” (February 2017), in which, with the aid of many maps and illustrations, it demonstrates the enormous potential of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The Initiative already involves three continents and 66 countries, and stretches from Lithuania to Indonesia, it notes; all have profited from explosive growth, which is bringing enormous benefits in transportation, energy production, communications, health care, and many other areas.
The EU’s strange attitude has long since become a subject of discussion in Asia. The S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore raised the question almost a year ago as to whether the EU had already missed the train of the New Silk Road. The European media have focused exclusively on Chinese takeovers, it noted, while entirely neglecting to explain the enormous potential that cooperation with China would bring to all sides. As a result, Europe’s citizens are extremely poorly informed.
Evil Humor
Even though the famous annual carnival program in Mainz is not as important as one or another of its proponents might think, this year’s version lends itself well to demonstrating the evil character of the group narcissism of the Establishment, which was at least selectively gathered in the audience. Several of the skits, such as those of Hans-Peter Betz and Lars Reichow, for example, had nothing to do with humor, being simply poisonous insults of the lowest level against Trump, to which—judging from the camera work—the audience responded with approval.
These skits not only betrayed bad taste, but reflect a hostility that shows how fragile the political situation is, and how flimsy the façade of the “western community of values” has become. Behind this façade we find that same claim to being the sole legitimate authority—a link to the unipolar world order—that meant there were no demonstrations against the wars based on lies in the Middle East. It is for precisely this reason that the neoliberal neocons are whining for the “nice” Obama. And it is less likely that Trump would have a problem finding Germany on the map—as one of the so-called comics claimed—than that they themselves would have trouble locating Yemen.
The world will continue to change dramatically over the next months, just as we have seen it do over the last year. If we are lucky, it will turn out the way it did the last time a system came to an end: There will be many about-faces and some people will keep on being blockheads. The difference is that this time, a large majority of countries is ready to set up an entirely new kind of cooperation among nation-states. The nations of Europe have the choice of either cooperating for a common destiny for the future of mankind, or soon be among the “also-rans.”
