| Thank you Michael for the useful warning about Ganser. Nevertheless I am left from your intervention with two curiosities.
First - and let me preface the I am in totally favour of vaccination and with any no vax sympathy - how the (absurd and offensive) suggestion that the unvaccinated are like the jews in Germany in the 1930 would be “anti-semite”.
Second, to what extent being D’Eramo formulation that "Russia’s unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine doesn’t absolve NATO of its responsibility in producing the conflict” contaminated by the agreement of a notorious conspiracy theorist and anti vaxxer makes it indeed false.
I wonder how much of what Giorgio Agamben (just to name one of many) has produced should be now scraped out of meritorious opinions given the circumstances…
Lorenzo Tripodi
On 14 Feb 2023, at 10:48, Michael Guggenheim <migug@bluewin.ch> wrote:
Dear Nettimers and Hans-Christian,
D’Eramo’s NLR sidecar article indeed contained a reference to Daniele Ganser, but it was a little bit more than a reference (I copy the whole passage into the email further down below). As you can see from the passage, D’Eramo does not just cite Ganser, but really advertise Ganser, and seems to be well aware of who he is: “Swiss Historian”, book available in x-languages but “not yet in English”.
For those outside the German speaking world: Ganser is a notorious conspiracy theorist, anti-semite (The unvaccinated are like the jews in Germany in the 1930s), anti-vaxxer etc. He indeed used to be a “historian” or rather a security analyst at ETH Zurich, and lost his job there over his conspiracy theories. Since then, he has built an online business model, selling “courses” on “inner peace” “content: Denigration, Digital Detox, Forest, Hope” or “Consciousness creates Peace” “content: Values, Deception, Corona, Awareness”. You get it. If you want more info, begin with his German wikipedia page here: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniele_Ganser Or read this article in a respected Swiss left weekly (before he went completely off rail during COVID):
The book that D’Eramo is referring to indeed contains a mixture of left hits: Everything is NATO’s fault, combined with highlights of the right behind all of this, maybe, are the, you know, Bilderbergs.
There would obviously have been plenty of better serious historical sources that D’Eramo could advertise that critically discuss the role of NATO, the US, and the CIA during the Cold War.
I sent an email to NLR alerting them to this quote. Maybe I was not the only one. I was hoping, and suggesting, they would add a comment to D’Eramo’s text, explaining who Ganser is, and maybe asking D’Eramo to explain to the reader why he included the passage. Instead they deleted it, without leaving a note as to the alteration of the text.
I understand that the editors of NLR may not know who Ganser is, and that they cannot be expected to check every reference in every text.
Given the passage in the text, I doubt that D’Eramo does not know who Ganser is.
I would have hoped that the editorial standards of NLR go beyond simply deleting the passage.
best Michael
Deleted from: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/sleepwalking-elites
And Russia’s unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine doesn’t absolve NATO of its responsibility in producing the conflict. (To get an idea of the Atlantic Alliance’s ‘pacifist’ vocation, it’s worth reading Swiss historian Daniele Ganser’s 2022 book NATO’s Illegal Wars, available in German, French and Italian, not yet in English). In today’s world, we rely on elites – technocrats, the ‘cognitive aristocracy’ – to pilot us through perilous waters with their superior wisdom.
Passage now reads:
And Russia’s unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine doesn’t absolve NATO of its responsibility in producing the conflict. In today’s world, we rely on elites – technocrats, the ‘cognitive aristocracy’ – to pilot us through perilous waters with their superior wisdom.
nettime-l@mail.kein.org On 14 Feb 2023, at 00:25, hans christian voigt <sozwiss@gmail.com> wrote: Dear Brian, weapons, munition and tools are coming from NATO states _and_ non NATO states.
Since you shared this weird opinion piece of D’Eramo just for the list of equipment which the US alone has sent, I would think it makes sense to keep in mind that this amount is just a fraction of what the US sent to the Soviet Union from 1941 on after Hitler Germany assaulted the up to this point ally in Stalin. I doubt you’d argue this made the UdSSR's war against Hitler Germany a proxy war.
After being raided the Ukraine to my knowledge had to buy lot of equipment from arms dealer for months for inflated prices. On the, I suppose, free market for weapons. This is to a good extend because before the Ukraine was not allowed to buy equipment from "the western".
Besides weapons, if we are talking involvement of the US, I presume the intelligence provided by the US is probably as significant as the now not anymore totally refused weapons delivery. Does the sharing of information that another regime is amassing troops, that an echelon is coming from these coordinates and one from there, does that, as it is vital for the course of the war and for defeating Russian troops, does that qualify the term of a proxy war or is that fair warning and vital help.
I see Putin's Russia very much as an imperial death cult the likes that Theweleit was analyzing so ingeniously . Yes, a defeat of Russia certainly will change the global security system. On the one hand I wonder why that is viewed as something bad and something one can intervene with and something that we can influence with anti-americanism while thousands die in the trenches and civilians get attacked constantly. Anyway, a defeat of Russia comes with huge risks for sure. As well as a defeat of the Ukraine. And there's all the other undeniable factors whose spillovers affect most people, as you wrote. At least there seems to be a larger-than-zero chance that one very powerful imperial death cult in our world might discontinue. May this cult crumble soon and it’s followers be forced to face it’s life-hostile ugliness.
On the other hand, no, I don’t think it’s so easy as to extrapolate from what was the NATO up until a while ago and expect uncontested Western military superiority. Even less so in the form as US superiority and the means to enforce the neoliberal capitalism the way it was enforced till f.e. the punishment of Greece (by Germany).
There are more countries joining NATO (Sweden and Finnland, possibly Ukraine and Georgia) and in the last year already it was the baltic states and Poland beside Scandinavia that were pushing "the west". The power structure inside NATO, inside "the west" seems to have changed quite a bit and where will it go from there? The same "west" has not just one but many countries that are on track of their own fascisms (imperial death cults included). As far as we experienced, fascism might be chaperoned with isolationism and even with strong opposition to NATO.
So, while NATO might grow in number it looks to me as it could get weaker and might disintegrate from within. Then there’s China that emerged clearly as more powerful than Russia. Russia as an empire might dissolve. But it’s not a given whose colonies the parts of the remains with all those resources will become. BRICS seems broken and the change from Lula to Bolsonaro back to Lula should be another reminder of the volatility of this world. Modi in India seems just as damn scary to me as the Arabic powers. Pakistan is huge, has nuclear weapons as well and faces a near future where most of the country will be to hot to survive is. Speaking of petro power, as an example, Austria’s chancellor looks to have opposed a gas-price brake (even on EU level) only because the emirates wealth funds have a big enough stake in the Austrian energy providers that his alliance lies with the emirates. Even against his voters.
Certainly dangerous time with immense future consequences. Feels like this is building up decade over decade honestly. A foreseeable future with huge areas of the planet made uninhabitable. Fascism permeating everywhere. A few times already made me cower in fear.
I remember specifically a period from 2007 to 2009 where I was struggling a lot with this paralyzing vista and it’s influence on my psyche. I same time found that immensely dangerous in itself. Dangerous and honestly very self centered. Since then I believe that this chilling effect is very dangerous for the individual psyche and our collective thinking. (Like D’Eramo who seems to argue that criminals with atom bombs should be allowed free terror reign because, well, they have the nuclear threat and look how stressed they are. I mean, it’s clearly not going the way he dreamed it up. Now that is making D'Eramo afraid and wouldn’t that be understandable? Poor fellow. Fuck real victims, I have my own problems, I am shitting myself.)
Sorry. Well, I absolutely second that it is important to analyze the new security systems emerging. Even more so as I guess they will not be very stable. In analyzing I hope we are wary of carrying forward outdated projections, bogeymen and conceptualities … and emotions. That, btw, in my world certainly does not come with amnesties for past crimes or historical misrepresentation of what NATO, the US and the likes did.
sry for my English
ps: pretty sure there was a positive reference to Daniel Ganser in D’Eramo’s text when I read it first that is not there anymore. Talking about dangerous. These men and women who make big bucks and a wealthy living in the business of conspiracy theories. They are thriving.
Am 13.02.2023 um 21:28 schrieb Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>:
Felix, I understand what you're reacting to, and to be clear, I support the Ukrainians in their war against Russian aggression. I think it's a necessary war for NATO to engage in, as I've said before. I also agree the term "liberal fascism" is meaningless, btw.
But this is also a great power war, fought with NATO weapons in Ukrainian hands. Up to now that's been called a proxy war, but if there's a better term, I'll take it. The point is definitely not to wallow in outdated concepts, but to grasp what's happening now.
I think this war is perceived by US and other Western strategists as the means for the installation of a new global security system in the face of increasing challenges to the post-WWII order. That order, originally defined by the US and cemented by NATO, is now fundamentally threatened by climate change and by the rise of East Asia. The intense bellicose signalling between China and the US reveals the larger stakes. Putin attempted to take advantage of this situation by establishing a partnership with China, but he failed.
Victory in Ukraine would reestablish uncontested Western military superiority at the global level, and allow the NATO countries to organize the next phase of capitalist development, just as the Gulf War did at the outset of neoliberalism in the 90s. But the world is now far more unstable than in the 90s. The Ukrainians are pushing for total victory, which is hard to imagine without Putin's fall. I doubt it is possible to achieve regime change in Russia without NATO troops on the ground.
My point is that this is a dangerous time with immense future consequences. It would be important to analyze the new security system as it emerges. Support for the Ukrainians does not mean turning a blind eye to what the most powerful countries are doing. The international system that emerges from this war will be the one that deals with the existential challenge of climate change.
Thoughtfully, Brian
On 12.02.23 20:50, Brian Holmes wrote:
> -- There's a war on in Europe, which is a proxy war that pits NATO
> against Russia, via the fighting force of Ukraine. Definitely check
> out the list of equipment which the US alone has sent:
> https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/sleepwalking-elites
> <https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/sleepwalking-elites> (list
> begins in paragraph 3)
I know this is not your point here, but to see this only as a proxy
war really reductive and reeks of a "great powers" analysis in which
some countries/people are just have to accept the fact that they are
subordinate.
The author of the NLR article comes right out with this world view:
> Ten years ago, nobody could have imagined that Europe would risk
> such a catastrophe for the sake of the Donbass – a region that few of
> us would have been able to locate on a map.
I'm sure most Ukrainians knew already 10 years ago where the Donbas was,
but why bother with their view. Also, the war in the Donbas started
2008, so not to know where the Donbas was in 2012 is really an act
of metropolitan ignorance. It happens, nothing to be proud of.
So, this war is primarily one of Ukrainian survival. I'm sure that many
in the US security apparatus see it also as a proxy-war, but I think
also Biden's theme of democracy-vs-authoritarianism plays a role. I
don't think it's a given that a republican administration under Trump
would have done the same (even if some in the military would still have
liked to fight a proxy war).
On 13.02.23 08:45, Stefan Heidenreich wrote:
> - the defeat of NATO could lead to a "decolonization" of Western
> Europe (not that this by itself leads to positive results. Repressive
> "liberal" fascism remains as likely an outcome as some sort of
> independence.)
Oh my, what this is supposed to mean, only chatGPT can explain.
--
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