New NATO bases in Bulgaria and Romania

Once a satellite, always a satellite. It seems Bulgaria is trying to rival Poland for being Eastern Europe's most supine client state'. As reported by Stars and Stripes on October 17 2009,

Col. Gary Russ, commander of Joint Task Force-East, said nobody in Romania or Bulgaria has challenged what the U.S. is doing in those countries since the missile defense plan was scrapped.

James Robbins, a senior fellow in national security affairs with the Washington-based think tank American Foreign Policy Council, said the U.S. efforts in Romania and Bulgaria are part of a global redeployment strategy started in the early years of the Bush administration to shift U.S. forces out of Germany and move them eastward.

Placing troops in those countries would not only be cheaper, but it would move them closer to the volatile Middle East, he said.

And while scrapping the missile defense plan could have created a sense that America wouldn’t live up to its commitments in the region, Robbins said, any move to pull U.S. conventional forces out of Eastern Europe would be "criminally foolish."

"It would be telling Russia that that U.S. is not interested in Eastern Europe and telling those countries that they are basically on their own," he said.

The Balkan Connection to the London Bombings

With the trial of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic for crimes against humanity, it in interesting to reflect on how the killing of 8000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995 has been used in Western Europe by Islamists who wish to portray 'Islamophobia' as a dangerous European wide phenomena akin to the anti-semitism that led to the Holocaust.

One reason for that lies in the way atrocities are politicised in to bolster the power agenda of those who seek to use 'identity politics' to carve out a career for themselves as well as to insinuate that every atrocity visited upon a nation is usually due to some prior sin committed by their government in the past.

Both the former Yugoslavia and the United Kingdom are multinational composite states and Kosovo has many similarities with Northern Ireland. Moreover, as communalist style Islamism has been patronised by the British government since the creation of the Muslim Council of Britain in 1996, ethnic and faith based sectarian politics has taken root.

That can be seen in the career of propagandists who see British foreign policy through the lens of Muslims constituting some transnational umma. This umma is everywhere victimised by either by cynical deals with the secular dictators in the oil rich successor states of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War or by wars of liberation that are 'all about oil'.

These wars are, of course, about oil. Yet the fact that those killed in Afghanistan and Iraq are predominantly Muslims is used to argue that they are being killed because they are Muslims and have been demonised in the press in order to get public support for wars that are also in the interests of national security.

Yet these are the same Islamists who complain that the West did nothing to defend the Bosnian Muslims whilst being cynical about NATO's motives in Afghanistan: though this conflict is about the TAPI pipeline there is no necessary reason why NATO planners have not considered its contruction a central part of its enlightened self-interest in also bringing democratic freedoms.

That the war in Afghanistan has contradictory aims that reflect the Utopian nature of 'liberal imperialism' has to be set in the context of the Long War for energy security, where liberals in the West will rationalise conflicts to maintain its power and credibility as a military power bloc that can deliver a steady supply of oil and gas if it can be linked to 'democracy promotion'.

Unfortunately, the much vaunted change from a cynical realpolitik to a new doctrine of humanitarian intervention is a myth, not least because underlying NATO's 78 day bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999 had been a crisis that had been escalated by the 'dirty war' whereby US secretary of State Richard Holbrooke had supported the Kosovo Liberation Army.

Tensions had been threatening to boil over in Kosovo throughout the Balkan Wars but Holbrooke in 1998 had decided that Milosevic could be tempted into a showdown with NATO through ramping up the conflict between Serbia and Kosovo by giving the KLA assistance in training and weapons.

That involved the inflow of ex-mujahadeen fighters in Al Qaida from Bosnia through Albania and into Kosovo, where the KLA retained connections with Afghanistan through their role in trafficking heroin from there directly into the West. The jihadists had been directly flown in by the USA and included members of Al Mujahiroun in Britain.

Moreover, it has been claimed that the military explosive C4 which was used in the bombs which blew up the three tube trains and bus in London on 7/7 originated from the Balkans, as indididuals associated with Al Qaida in Britain were allowed to come and go in and out of Britain by the security services who had colluded with them in Bosnia.

Though a lot more research needs to go into this connection, if the evidence provided by writers such as Peter Dale Scott and Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed who have argued it forthrightly stands up, the whole controversy about the role of Islam in the West has been conducted not according to the facts.

On the contrary, the propaganda war in the West has been fought over what ideologues want to read into the nature of 'the terror threat' for their own partisan reasons.

Take the Muslim Council of Britain's Inayat Bunglawala. It is clear that his decision to take a stand both against the British Nationalist Party and Al Mujiharoun's new incarnation UK/Islam4UK over the violence in Luton and East London is a farce because this Islamist group can be loathed for not being truly Islamist.

The problem with Al Mujihiroun is that it is known they were tolerated by the security services as they acted as a recruitment base for sending jihadists to fight proxy wars in places like Bosnia and Serbia in the 1990s. To that extent they can be considered 'traitors' by Islamists and far-right nationalists who see the state as dividing and ruling over them.

It was during the Balkan Wars that attitudes hardened: remember that many Islamists became militant due to the brutalities inflicted upon Muslims by Serbian Christians in Bosnia and the BNP is very much pro-Serb and for the purity of the Slavic races against the 'resurgent' threat of Islam.

The reference to the 'Balkanisation' of Britain was first heard in the 1990s and it is something all people who care about the future of democracy should have considered very carefully when looking at the history of the Balkan Wars, where those who lived side by side became one another's killers.

Contrary to received opinion, 'ancient enmities' did not suddenly explode of themselves suddenly after the deep freeze of the Cold War was lifted: they were deliberately encouraged by those politicians who knew from the Communist system how to use propaganda to instil 'identity politics'.

The same process has been developing within Britain since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Communism. Despite the facade of multicultural tolerance, the idea of identity politics is continually trumping either the notion of shared citizenship within a particular land and also the stress on certain universal values.

Instead there is this trading off of one set of group rights against other set of group rights that are equally in danger of being attacked by the other. This is a recipe for disaster and one couched in obfuscating jargon by those who passively and fatalistically crave it to happen through boredom with Western consumerism and a belief in Western degeneracy.

This is why the facts about the Balkan connection to Islamist terrorism in Britain need to be brought to light: it will prove that the actual responsibility for the terror threat lies with the irresponsibility of the US and UK states in their pursuit of a realpolitik that will deliver energy security.

That does not mean that Islamist organisations also do not have a repellent ideology that exists independent of what the British state does. The point is that tensions would not have reached such a level had Britain not colluded so closely with a foreign policy that reveals it as both craven and weak as well as motivated by greed and the desire for oil.

For the NATO action on Kosovo was about providing stability for the construction of the AMBO pipeline which will connect Bulgaria to Albania through Macedonia, a state on the brink of ethnic conflict itself as the conflict between Kosovan Albanians and Serbs intensified. The price of US strategy has been the establishment of a criminal mafia state in Kosovo and terrorism.

( This is an outline sketch of the interconnectedness of the Balkans to drugs, oil and terrorism that I will be pursuing in considerably more detail in the months ahead. I will be looking at the Bosnian and Kosovan connections with Al Qaida in more detail later, with footnotes and specific links ).

Britain's Party Political Alliances in Eastern Europe.

British Conservative MP and propagandist ( ie spin doctor )Harry Phibbs has tried to defend the Tories alliance with right wing nationalists in Latvia and Poland by the time honoured trick of pointing to New Labour's more unsavoury partners in the European Parliament.

What Phibbs does not explain is why Cameron has chosen to ally with far right populists rather than Conservative Christian Democrats in Germany or liberal conservatives in other European nations.

The real reason the British Conservative Party have allied with PiS is that both want to see a American neoliberal model of economy and society prevail in Europe as against the Rhineland model preferred by Germany and France.

In foreign policy too both Cameron's Tories and PiS are fanatical neoconservatives who view Russia under Putin crudely as a Neo-Soviet threat to Europe as a pretext to call for a more forthright expansion of NATO and a 'New Cold War'

That's one reason why both Cameron and Lech Kaczynski took a 'shoulder to shoulder' position with the far right Georgian nationalist Mikheil Saakashvili after he attacked Russia in August 2008 against "the Russian bully".

By comparison France and Germany tend to want a pragmatic relationship with Russia whilst the neoconservatives, as represented by Gove, Ancram etc want NATO to advance into Central Asia and getting the USA more heavily involved in Europe is the lkey.

By dividing the EU between those who want a more pro-US model of society and state, the EU cannot exert as much influence on global geopolitics towards Russia and so the USA can continue to lead the Free World in alliance with its model pupils in Britain and Eastern Europe.

The leftist populist parties Phibbs mention in Slovakia, SMER led by Robert Fico, tend to be far more friendly towards Russia as was the nationalist and populist Vladimir Meciar.

That is why Phibbs dislikes it but, despite its alliance with the horrid Slovak Nationalist Party, which is mostly anti-Hungarian and anti-Roma than anti-semitic, its main sin for the neoconservatives is not to be anti-Russian.

The same cannot be said of the Polish populist right which conflates anti-Communism with a nationalist hatred of Russia, something useful if the missile shield and military-financial complex is to be promoted.

It is in that context that Kaminski's anti-semitism is to be understood. As a spin doctor, Kaminski knows his job is too tap into the nature of pathological resentments and atavistic impulses to get votes.

The discussion about whether Kaminski is "anti-semitic" is irrelevant: his comment about Kwasniewski's apology for the Jedwabne Massacre was, however, laden with the myth of Judeo-Communism.

Kaminski claimed,

First of all, I need to know what I am apologising for. I apologise for a handful of outcasts. Secondly, I can do that if I know that someone from the Jewish side will apologise for what the Jews did during the Soviet occupation between 1939 and 1941. For the mass collaboration of the Jewish people with the Soviet occupier, for fighting Polish partisans in this area.

There was no 'mass collaboration' of Jews with the Soviet Union. It was this myth that rationalised the massacre of the Jews at Jedwabne and that was used in the Baltics and Romania as the pretext for genocide.

Moreover, 'the Jews' were Poles and there was no 'side' for them to apologise for nor was the author of the book which ignited the controversy, Jan T Gross, arguing for 'collective guilt': he was calling for collective responsibility.

Collective responsibility is very different from collective guilt: it means that those who identify with the noble past of a nation also confront the darker aspects of it the better to move on.

Phibbs does not seem to care about the facts in Kaminski's case but then again his main job as a spin doctor himself is to promote the Orwellian benefits of having a selective memory.

If New Labour is to be condemned for its alliance with the Hungarian MSZP of Frerenc Gyurcsany on the basis Communists were no better than Fascists it at least should be remembered that the MSZP is economically free market.

In fact, the MSZP is far more pro-free market neoliberalism than the opposition conservatives of Fidesz which proves that much of the spat over British parties Pan-European alliances reflects a tedious 'identity politics'.

Having said all that, Phibbs does have a case when pointing towards the hypocrisy of New Labour functionaries like Miliband for condemning the Nazi sympathies of the far right in Latvia and Estonia.

After all, Miliband supported Saakashvili who in turn is a staunch ally of Nazi era revisionists and pro-neoliberal economists like Mart Laar and other nationalists who have signed an Open Letter calling for NATO expansion.

When Obama dropped the plan to base the missile shield in Poland in September, politicians on the nationalist right Lech Kaczynski, Mart Laar and Adamkus joined hands with the liberal left (Kwasniewski, Havel) to bemoan its betrayal before 'the Russian threat'.

In an age of pathological struggle for diminishing resources like oil and gas, all morality in politics is becoming redundant and expedient alliances that allow the triumph of one power bloc over another entirely normal.

The irony is that neoliberal economics, something encouraging the destruction of the nation state and social cohesion, is being promoted by Cameron and Phibbs as well as the Polish populist right.

In other words, especially in Poland, the very source of anger and resentment caused by neoliberal economic policies is channelled into atavistic nationalism which promises to stop national decline from sinister 'external threats'.

The Real Leon Trotsky

This month has seen the publication of Robert Service's biography of Leon Trotsky who for decades after 1917 was seen as the heroic 'good' alternative to the Stalinist regime of the 1930s which was seen as 'counter revolution' and a 'betrayal' of the Revolution.

To the extent that this myth survives even now amongst the remnant of the revolutionary left, Service's work is an important debunking of the idea that the Revolution as identified with Trotsky's leadership would have avoided mass terror and dictatorship.

As Service writes, in a review of Patenaude's Stalin's Nemesis : The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky,

.....he helped to design and build a political order that persecuted whole social categories. His Terrorism and Communism, written in 1920, justified the application of terror to presumed "enemies of the people". In his period of power after the October Revolution, he revelled in introducing a harsh dictatorial regime and never questioned the need for one-party rule.

His ferocity continued after his deportation. In 1931, when the Menshevik leaders were arraigned in a show trial, he spared not an ounce of compassion. For Trotsky, as for Stalin, such people deserved to be punished without pity.

....Trotsky was a master of selectivity and evasiveness when telling the story of his career and he drew a curtain across his complicity in consolidating an edifice of lawless dictatorship.

With regards Trotsky's creation of the myth that, but for Stalin's consolidation of power, he represented 'socialism with a human face', John Gray in Literary Review praises Service's work and reveals the brute facts about this sophisticated ideological gangster when he argues,

This has never been a terribly plausible view of the man who welcomed the ruthless crushing of the Kronstadt workers and sailors when they demanded a more pluralist system of government in 1921, and who defended the systematic use of terror against opponents of the Soviet state until his dying day. Introducing a system of hostage-taking in the Civil War and consistently supporting the trial and execution of dissidents (Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries, liberal Kadets, nationalists and others), Trotsky never hesitated to endorse repression against those who stood in the way of communist power.

Western historians have largely accepted Trotsky's self-serving account of his opposition to Stalin's policies and methods, but the differences between the two leaders were more limited than has been commonly believed. Trotsky favoured moving quickly to central planning and collective farming, and shared Stalin's view of the need to isolate the kulaks (richer peasants). Far from being more liberal than Stalin, during the New Economic Policy (NEP) he blamed Stalin for sheltering Menshevik economists.

It was Trotsky who pushed ahead with the 'militarisation of labour', which imposed army-style discipline and punishment on Soviet workers. Hailed as an apostle of cultural freedom because of his interest in the arts, Trotsky believed as much as Stalin did that culture must be assessed (and policed) in terms of its political correctness. Trotsky's influential essay Literature and Revolution, Service writes, 'was essentially a work of political reductionism. When all is said and done, it was Trotsky who laid down the philosophical foundations for cultural Stalinism.'

That's quite incisively damning as is the the idea that Trotsky had some kind of unique insight into the nature of Nazism that rescues him 'morally' from the opprobrium attached to Stalin and Hitler as rival totalitarian dictators.

There is something ludicrous in the spectacle of Trotsky scorning the futility of democracy at a time when Hitler had almost extinguished it in Europe. But it is of a piece with an entire life of self-deception. As Service writes, Trotsky 'had matchless self-righteousness'.

In The Revolution Betrayed (written in 1936) he admitted that the Soviet Union was like Hitler's Germany, a totalitarian state. He never admitted any responsibility for bringing the Soviet version of totalitarianism into being.

But along with Lenin he had created the system that Stalin inherited and used for ends with which Trotsky generally sympathised. Inhumanly ruthless in his dealings with non-Bolsheviks and at the same time thoroughly inept in his relations with Stalin, Trotsky was too vain and self-deceiving to merit the status of tragic hero accorded him by Western admirers.

Undoubtedly he was courageous, and it can hardly be denied that he was a key player in some of the formative conflicts of the last century. But in the end it is impossible to see him as other than an absurd figure, a fantasist seeking to found a paradise who helped build a hell on earth.

Kosovo and the Long War for Energy Security.

The notion that the NATO attack on Serbia in 1999 was 'all about oil' has often been ridiculed by certain commentators on the liberal-left because it seems like the usual reflex reaction of those like American radical Noam Chomsky who always appear to see cynical and devious motives underlying the US foreign policy.

The more, however, that the facts are looked at, it is undoubtedly the case that the military intervention in Kosovo did have the usual Great Power political interests at stake that have always motivated them to support the form of nationalism that works according to their interests

Despite propaganda to the contrary, Kosovo was no exception.

The 'best' case for NATO intervention in 1999 could claim enlightened self interest as it's aim. Even if intervention was a turning point in decisively transforming NATO from a defensive alliance to protect democracy against dictatorships, which Milosevic's Serbia was not, it is often argued that intervention stopped the demon orchestrator of Yugoslavia's descent into civil war.

This simplistic version of events should not act as a pretext for trying to pretend Milosevic was 'demonised' because he remained in some senses a real socialist opposed to privatisation as Neil Clark does argue somewhat naively because of the undoubted cynicism of US intentions with regards breaking up Yugoslavia into micromanaged client states.

I have become more interested recently by the way the USA has colluded with the terrorists of the KLA and how it has assisted and nurtured paramilitary organisations like the KLA no better than the Serb gangsters like Arkan's Tigers who terrorised Bosnia in the 1990s and who had connections with Al Qaida.

Tom Burghardt wrote this which sets the Balkans nexus in it's true context of a war to secure pipeline routes and advance NATO power into Central Asia no matter what the cost with regards the much vaunted aim of 'democracy promotion' as well as the scale of the pathological 'dirty war' being fought for geopolitical hegemony and control over oil.

When Kosovo proclaimed its "independence" in February, the Western media hailed the provocative dismemberment of Serbia, a move that completed the destruction of Yugoslavia by the United States, the European Union and NATO, as an exemplary means to bring "peace and stability" to the region.

If by "peace" one means impunity for rampaging crime syndicates or by "stability," the freedom of action with no questions asked by U.S. and NATO military and intelligence agencies, not to mention economic looting on a grand scale by freewheeling multinational corporations, then Kosovo has it all!

From its inception, the breakaway Serb province has served as a militarized outpost for Western capitalist powers intent on spreading their tentacles East, encircling Russia and penetrating the former spheres of influence of the ex-Soviet Union. As a template for contemporary CIA destabilization operations in Georgia and Ukraine, prospective EU members and NATO "partners," Kosovo should serve as a warning for those foolish enough to believe American clichés about "freedom" or the dubious benefits of "globalization."

Camp Bondsteel, located on rolling hills and farmland near the city of Ferizaj/Urosevac, is the largest U.S. military installation on the European continent. Visible from space, in addition to serving as an NSA listening post pointed at Russia and as the CIA's operational hub in the Balkans and beyond, some observers believe that Andreas J.'s notebook may have contained information that Camp Bondsteel continues to serve as a CIA "black site." One motive for rolling up the BND intelligence operation may have been U.S. fears that this toxic information would become public, putting paid U.S. claims that it no longer kidnaps and tortures suspected "terrorists."

When NATO partners Germany and the U.S. decided to drive a stake through Yugoslavia's heart in the early 1990s during the heady days of post-Cold War triumphalism, their geopolitical strategy could not have achieved "success" without the connivance, indeed active partnership amongst Yugoslavia's nationalist rivals. As investigative journalist Misha Glenny documented,

Most shocking of all, however, is how the gangsters and politicians fueling war between their peoples were in private cooperating as friends and close business partners. The Croat, Bosnian, Albanian, Macedonian, and Serb moneymen and mobsters were truly thick as thieves. They bought, sold, and exchanged all manner of commodities, knowing that the high levels of personal trust between them were much stronger than the transitory bonds of hysterical nationalism. They fomented this ideology among ordinary folk in essence to mask their own venality. As one commentator described it, the new republics were ruled by "a parastate Cartel which had emerged from political institutions, the ruling Communist Party and its satellites, the military, a variety of police forces, the Mafia, court intellectuals and with the president of the Republic at the center of the spider web...Tribal nationalism was indispensable for the cartel as a means to pacify its subordinates and as a cover for the uninterrupted privatization of the state apparatus. (McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008, p. 27)

Glenny's description of the 1990s convergence of political, economic and security elites with organized crime syndicates in Western intelligence operations is the quintessential definition of the capitalist deep state.

In Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Peter Dale Scott describes how the deep state can be characterized by "the symbiosis between governments (and in particular their intelligence agencies) and criminal associations, particularly drug traffickers, in the stabilization of right-wing terror in Vietnam, Italy, Bolivia, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and other parts of the world." Indeed, "revelations in the 1970s and 1980s about the 'strategy of tension,' whereby government intelligence agencies, working in international conjunction, strengthened the case for their survival by actually fomenting violence, recurringly in alliance with drug-trafficking elements."

Scott's analysis is perhaps even more relevant today as "failed states" such as Kosovo, characterized by economic looting on an industrial scale, the absence of the rule of law, reliance on far-right terrorists (of both the "religious" and "secular" varieties) to achieve policy goals, organized crime syndicates, as both assets and executors of Western policy, and comprador elites are Washington's preferred international partners.

For the ruling elites of the former Yugoslavia and their Western allies, Kosovo is a veritable goldmine. Situated in the heart of the Balkans, Kosovo's government is deeply tied to organized crime structures: narcotrafficking, arms smuggling, car theft rings and human trafficking that feeds the sex slave "industry." These operations are intimately linked to American destabilization campaigns and their cosy ties to on-again, off-again intelligence assets that include al-Qaeda and other far-right terror gangs. As investigative journalist Peter Klebnikov documented in 2000,The Kosovar traffickers ship heroin exclusively from Asia's Golden Crescent. It's an apparently inexhaustible source.

At one end of the crescent lies Afghanistan, which in 1999 surpassed Burma as the world's largest producer of opium poppies. From there, the heroin base passes through Iran to Turkey, where it is refined, and then into the hands of the 15 Families, which operate out of the lawless border towns linking Macedonia, Albania, and Serbia. Not surprisingly, the KLA has also flourished there. According to the State Department, four to six tons of heroin move through Turkey every month. "Not very much is stopped," says one official. "We get just a fraction of the total." ("Heroin Heroes," Mother Jones, January-February 2000)

Thoughts on Father Popieluszko and Archbishop Romero

Although Roman Catholic Christianity is a universal religion, the martyrdom of clerics murdered by the Polish Communist regime under the sway of the Soviet Union is seldom directly compared with the murder of them by US financed death squads in Latin America.

Polskie Radio reports,

Two-day observances commemorating the 25th anniversary of the murder of ‘Solidarity priest’, Father Jerzy Popieluszko have began today.

Father Popieluszko was murdered by the Communist secret police on 19 October 1984, events depicted in the 1988 movie To Kill a Priest, starring Tim Roth and directed by Agnieszka Holland.

“It is important that we do not treat this day like a jubilee,” Metropolitan of Warsaw, Archbishop Kazimierz Nycz told Polish Radio.

We should remember it as a warning against what hatred can do – hatred towards faith, the Church and ‘other’ people.”

True, but for a large number of Poles belief in the Catholic Church is tantamount to anti-Communism, an adjunct to Polish idenity and a driving force in the nationalist resistance to Soviet imposed domination.

Comparisons with the murder of Archbishop Romero in El Salvador are seldom drawn, though that would be useful given the uncritical and subservient relationship between Poland and the USA adhered to by almost every mainstream politician in Warsaw.

Romero's killing was carried out by militias under Major Roberto D'Aubuisson, trained and educated by the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation , formerly the School of the Americas

(WHISC or WHINSEC) is a United States Department of Defense facility at Fort Benning near Columbus, Georgia in the United States.

Between 1946 and 2001, the SOA trained more than 61,000 Latin American soldiers and policemen includinf Galtieri, Noriega and many of Pinochet's officers, something that would endear it to admirers of the Chilean Fascist dictator like Michal Kaminski of PiS.

In the spirit of Nycz's words that his commemoration ought not to be a jubilee, guess how avid Church goers in Poland have reacted ?

It is not by reflecting on the bad that hatred can do by looking at current politicians who claim to defend Poland's Catholic essence by espousing anti-Jewish inuendos and peddling myths of Judeo-Communism. Of course not, instead they hold a fun run.

A commemorative run in tribute to the killed priest has begun in Bydgoszcz, central Poland. Around 300 participants have shown up at the starting line of the 110-kilometer relay run, with the ages of participants ranging from 15 to 65 years.

The finishing line is located in Włocławek, where a special mass to pray for the beatification of Father Popiełuszko was held earlier today.

Whilst Poland's Catholic culture provided for the tenacious fight against Soviet Communism, since 1989-1990 it has also acted as a force for various degrees of inertia, fanatism, parochialism and a lack of any perspective on the nature of imperial power practiced by the USA.

It is not even that Catholicism does not provide the opportunity for criticism of Empire, as Pope John Paul II demonstrated in criticising neoliberal capitalism and consumerism, as well as refusing to give his sanction to the illegal US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Pope John Paul II made Romero a 'Servant of God' and calls for his beatification have continued since his murde. If any Catholic figure was the equivalent of those who criticised Soviet totalitarianism it was Romero. Just as in Latin America, the USA played the role of the Soviet Union.

Romero condemned the United States for giving military aid to the right wing government and wrote to President Carter in February 1980, arguing that increased US military aid would "undoubtedly sharpen the injustice and the repression inflicted on the organized people, whose struggle has often been for their most basic human rights"

Carter stressed, however, that El Salvador would become "another Nicaragua" and that would be bad for US business interests and brushed aside Romero's pleas and continued military assistance to the Salvadoran government.

It was at the same time in 1979-1980 that Carter's National Security Zbigniew Brzezinski advisor saw in Solidarity the opportunity to undermine the Soviet Union, parallel to giving covert aid to the Afghan mujahadeen in order to draw the Soviets into the civil war.

With the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 the legacy of this cynical brand of realpolitik and the necessity of understanding that Poland was part of the calculation to expand US influence in Central Asia has become greater than ever.

There is a difference between an expedient alliance with the USA in the context of the Cold War and throwing off Soviet Imperial domination and mistaking that for predetermined suprahistorical and messianic mission to liberate the world of which 1990 was the beginning.

It is this ironically that has led the uncritical support for the USA as a 'redeemer nation' take on some of the aspects of the Communist political religion that was once rejected by Catholics as a usurpation of God's power.

Poles, Politeness and Twittering Dolts

The idiotic Stephen Fry has been trying to wriggle out of his comment about Auschwitz being in Poland and that it was no co-incidence.

The more probable explanation is that, as my father and squadrons of school teachers correctly reminded me throughout my childhood and youth, “Stephen just doesn’t think.” Anyway. Words tumbled from my lips during that interview that were as idiotic, ignorant and offensive as you could imagine. It all been proceeding along perfectly acceptable lines until I said something like “let’s not forget which side of the border Auschwitz was on.”

I mean, what was I thinking? Well, as I say, I wasn’t. The words just formed themselves in a line in my head, as words will, and marched out of the mouth. I offer no excuse. I seemed to imply that the Polish people had been responsible for the most infamous of all the death factories of the Third Reich. I didn’t even really at the time notice the import of what I had said, so gave myself no opportunity instantly to retract the statement. It was a rubbishy, cheap and offensive remark that I have been regretting ever since.

No, it was a comment based on an attempt to slander an entire nation and as such was no less bigoted than those Poles Fry berated for their anti-semitism and 'homophobia', a premeditated sneer at those presumed to be backward parochial halfwits in less developed nations of Europe.

Well, these words are not going to tumble out at random. Stephen Fry is a a tedious and sententious waffling dolt.

Thatcherism and Eastern Europe.

According to Polskie Radio

Baroness Margaret Thatcher has been granted an honourary degree from the University in Lodz, central Poland.

The former British prime minister could not be present at the ceremony in Poland due to health problems. The title was granted in London and transmission from the ceremony was presented at the University of Lodz .

In her speech Margaret Thatcher thanked the university for the honour and said that her generation will never forget Poles, who escaped from their Nazi occupied homeland to defend British shores. She added that her visit to the Gdansk shipyard in 1989 made her realise that Poland will soon become a free country.

Margaret Thatcher was a advocate of the democratic changes in Poland, her support has contributed to the economic, free market transformations in this country.

Well, some of the the political elites in Solidarity like Balcerowicz laud Thatcher because she was both anti-communist and ideologically pro-US and was the progenitor of 'shock therapy'.

The problem for Balerowicz and his political partners in the USA and Poland was that the workers in Solidarity might come to believe that freedom might actually apply to them in the social and economic sphere.

Hence shock therapy was most useful is destroying Solidarity as well as other remnants of the Communist period and enriching those who ever since have broken with everything Solidarity stood for.

Whether it's Sikorski joking about the effects of cluster bombs on civilians ( so much for the principle of "non-violence" ) or pursuing the missile shield as a revanchist policy against Russia that conveniently also boosts Poland's ability to benefit from the military industrial complex.

Or whether it is Balcerowicz praising his own ability to manipulate and exploit the public mood of euphoria to impose 'reforms' that destroyed the livelihood of millions only later to opine that he might have underestimated the human reaction to his reforms.

The logic of this "extraordinary politics" has been termed by radical writer Naomi Klein as "the shock doctrine", whereby in a crisis politicians can ignore legislative rules and rush through unpopular "reforms."

Balcerowicz's Plan was founded on a neoliberal creed-sometimes termed "Market Leninism"-in which radical changes of the economic regime are possible only during a limited period of "extraordinary politics",

Radical changes of the political regime, carried by a spirit of revolutionary enthusiasm and accompanied by the willingness to assume sacrifices for the sake of a better future, release "political capital," an essential "resource" for the completion of "regime change".

The conjuncture of an economic crisis with a potential political backlash is regarded as an opportunity to ram through measures that re-engineer society, destroy rival centres of power, especially trade unions, and to entrench the elite power of 'those who know best'.

The neoliberal experiment that Balcerowicz unleashed upon Poland had not only been deployed by Margaret Thatcher in Britain according to the prescriptions of economists like Miton Friedman, for whom Balcerowicz wrote a fulsome obituary.

Disturbingly before that it was tested in Pinochet's Chile following the coup in 1973 which overthrew the democratically elected but unstable and Communist influenced government of Salvador Allende and introduced a Fascist dictatorship.

The ideological can be very 'anti-political' as it obvious with the history of Communist and Fascist totalitarianism is a stock observation of dissidents like Adam Michnik who since 1989 have failed to get to grips with how liberal democracy is undercut by neoliberal globalisation.

What is seldom observed is that this as is evident with the neoliberal globalism pursued by liberal left elites whose Positivistic creed of a "government by experts" has appealed as much to authoritarians

Positivism was an ideological influence on the Chicago Boys the market fundamentalists who engineered the recovery of the health of Chile through 'savagely cutting government expenditure ( except on the military) , dismantling the welfare state and producing a boom of sorts for the top 40% of the population' .( Mark Almond , Uprising ).

Such 'success' created by Thatcher in 1980s Britain ( the Chilean experience is conveniently forgotten by most tubthumpers for neoliberalism in Central and Eastern Europe ) is one clearly admired by the elites in Central and Eastern Europe as a key part in creating an ever expanding 'sphere of liberty'.

For Soros' and his Open Society Foundation's operations tend to prove, promoting neoliberalism through coups have not lost their appeal, as Soros' support for Saakashvili's coming to power in Georgia during the mass media staged and choreographed 'Rose Revolution' of 2003 demonstrates.

As Mark Almond commented,

.......the west's favoured candidate won 96 per cent of the vote to replace him. Generous George Soros stepped in to pay the salaries of the new president's ministers and policemen in Georgia. Soros's business partner Kakha Bendukidze became economy minister.Such a philanthropic interest in law enforcement meant Georgian officers now get up to US$1,000 a month

That makes obeying orders very profitable if a little costly to the Western taxpayers and Mr Soros who have picked up so much of the tab.

Overcome with enthusiasm for Saakashvili's regime, the police resorted to draconian techniques been used to disperse protesters in Tblisi in November 2007 including tear gas, rubber bullets, beatings and the use of special forces to smash up the Imedi TV studios.

Such heavy handed policing was not commented upon by Soros who remained silent whilst any evidence of heavy handed policing in Lukashenko's Belarus is seen as evidence of a nightmare Stalinist tyranny that could not happen in a liberal democracy.

Instead the protesters are depicted as heroic youthful democrats and not adolescents being given cash by Western NGOs to fake dissent because most of them think their nation is a 'dead zone' and really boring.

So much so that they see the EU as containing states that act as beacons of liberty when their own dreary police prevents then unfurling EU flags from tower blocks, unaware that Poland has just passed a law banning the sale and display of Communist symbols and memorabilia.

This doublethink world is possible where corporate advertising, Leninist vanguard politics and globalist Utopianism have come together.

Western societies have been taken over by an elite intent on terminating the development of their culture and nations and giving them over wholly to a frantic and horny consumption driven by manipulated lusts and an advertising that taps into the craving for security and 'satisfaction'.

Slovenian Marxist theorist Slavoj Zizek calls these elites 'liberal communists' and detests the manner in which internationalism has been conscripted to serve global capitalism and to reduce the revolutionary truth project to 'inauthenticity'.

Yet Zizek as someone who understands the nature of 'Market Leninism' partly because as a 'real' Leninist who has a disturbing penchant for seeing revolutionary terror as purifying in a pathological way, has a point when he writes about,

Nietzsche's old opposition between active and passive nihilism. Active nihilism, in the sense of wanting nothing itself, is this active self-destruction which would be precisely the passion of the real - the idea that, in order to live fully and authentically, you must engage in self-destruction. On the other hand, there is passive nihilism, what Nietzsche called 'The last man' - just living a stupid, self-satisfied life without great passions.

The policy of massive private debt fuelled consumerism depends upon it to dampen down citizens to passive consumers nihilistically abdicating all responsibility for themselves and for others because they 'just wanna be happy' and because they cannot do anything about the world.

To a large extent, this has been the aim of the Polish technocratic elite. They have been helped in this by a Catholic Church that encorages and promote a banal herd conformity, a stupefying divertion into a world of fantasy and kitsch that dovetails well enough with consumerism.

After all, the Polish Catholic Church is not to be outdone by the competition from the new shopping malls and is installing chapels in places like Galeria Slask, though whether they will actively try to admonish the sins of the teenagers who sell their bodies for clothes is unknown.

Polish Higher Education-Largely a Meaningless Ritual.

Cheating at university in Poland is “not unusual” and many students say that they would be buy a masters thesis.

Reveals Gazeta Wyborcza ( source Polskie Radio website )

Under Communism it was joked that the workers regime could produce anything but most of all it could produce statistics. The education system in Poland reflects this as much as it does in Britain where getting more students to do utterly pointless degrees is seen as an end in itself.

In Britain, though at least, the educational part of getting a degree is taken partly seriously on its own terms and the better universities make it their business to actually educate students and open their minds to the world around them.

Unfortunately the same cannot be said for a large number of students in Poland.

According to a survey by the PSB DGA pollsters, 54 per cent of students reveal that, in their group, cheating is not unusual, while 39 per cent of students claim that tutors do not mind cheating at exams.

Students do not refrain from buying a Master’s thesis, either. Although 80 per cent of students assure that they would never ask someone to write a dissertation for them, 11 per cent would buy a thesis for over 500 zloty (119 euro) and 9 per cent for less than that.

Despite the generally held view that Polish universities have a good image abroad, standards have been falling rapidly as numbers rise but finances to not keep pace.

Lecturers frequently skip lectures due to having a job in more than one place of learning. In one of Poland’s higher schools, students were taught by a deceased teacher who had been recorded on a video tape.

Meanwhile, intellectual potential of MA graduates has dramatically gone down because of the influx of universities, mainly private ones. Twenty years ago the number of students did not exceed 400,000, today it is almost 2 million.

However, it seems that neither university staff, nor students notice the inconvenience and the fall of teaching standards. Ninety one percent of university teachers and 84 per cent of students claim that they are satisfied with their performance and the university they work or study at. No one feels anger or shame and just a few students – 19 per cent - are bored (usually at private universities).

University staff praise themselves for being wise, talented and always prepared for the classes (95 per cent). Students largely support this opinion (87 per cent).

Cheating is routine in Polish schools and universities. Poles even tend cheat in EFL lessons even when the result is of no importance. For the reason that one cannot look stupid and that 'face' must be maintained.

Lecturers do nothing to stop it and students are overburdened with meaningless rote learning in subjects they study for 5 years that will allow them to go to the UK and work at Starbucks. There seems to be no reason not to cheat if everyone is doing it.

Quantity is not quality and most students in Krakow spend their time getting drunk and cramming and cheating to pass exams which require mechanically reproducing facts and theories. The education system does not encourage free thinking nor individuality.

Literal mindedness and regurgitating information does not add up to being "kulturalny'. It has about as much meaning as learning by heart the instructions for erecting a table from a DIY flatpack and repeating them, a mere memory game.

As JG Ballard said of British degress they are about as impressive these days as a diploma in origami and about as useful.

A great number of Polish students fail to engage seriously with their subjects. As in Britain ( but even more here ) 'being a student' is just what any kid of average intelligence just 'does', as though a rite of passage.

It also presents an invariable opportunity for students from small towns across Malopolska to meet members of the opposite sex and to get married at an absurdly young age, only later to spend their time trapped in marriages that increasingly break up.

Like Church attendence, going to university in Poland is ritualistic and it is a complete waste of time educating such people if the standards are so poor and cheating is rife no less than people going to Church if they do not even understand what it is they are supposed to believe in.

There are far too many students concentrated in Krakow as well. They need to be contained in new out of centre campuses and the rail network needs to be improved too to cope with the bottleneck caused by students leaving on Friday and returning on Sunday night.

Increasingly I get the feeling, after having lived here on and off for the most part of the last decade, that Poland remains a 'prisoner of the past', a place where people moan and dwell on how stupid everything is but lack the energy or hope to provide contructive solutions.

It will no longer do to just bemoan Poland's bad fortune in the past, to blame the Communist 'system', because even the staunchest anti-Communist Pole exhibits a mentality that continues to be determined by Communism.

To actually reveal such an opinion about Poland risks an unpleasant response. But it's true and just as Britain needs to face some 'home truths' Poland also needs to be told that entire aspects of its public life is moribund.

John Laughland

I though I'd provide some more links to Laughland for my own reference and for others to follow too,

Full Marx For George Bush, The Spectator 2005

A Postmodern Declaration ( On Kosovo's Independence ), The Guardian Jan 2008-Kosovo's sovereignty is a fiction: real power lies with EU officials backed by western firepower

On The Path to Barbarity, The Guardian, November 2007-It is no accident that those who advocate war for humanitarian reasons end up justifying torture

The Mythology of People Power, The Guardian, April 2005-The glamour of street protests should not blind us to the reality of US-backed coups in the former USSR

The Revolution Televised, The Guardian, November 2004-The western media's view of Ukraine's election is hopelessly biased

The demonstrations in favour of Viktor Yushchenko have laser lights, plasma screens, sophisticated sound systems, rock concerts, tents to camp in and huge quantities of orange clothing; yet we happily dupe ourselves that they are spontaneous.

Or again, we are told that a 96% turnout in Donetsk, the home town of Viktor Yanukovich, is proof of electoral fraud. But apparently turnouts of over 80% in areas which support Viktor Yushchenko are not. Nor are actual scores for Yushchenko of well over 90% in three regions, which Yanukovich achieved only in two. And whereas Yanukovich's final official score was 54%, the western-backed president of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, officially polled 96.24% of the vote in his country in January.

The observers who now denounce the Ukrainian election welcomed that result in Georgia, saying that it "brought the country closer to meeting international standards".

The blindness extends even to the posters which the "pro-democracy" group, Pora, has plastered all over Ukraine, depicting a jackboot crushing a beetle, an allegory of what Pora wants to do to its opponents.

Such dehumanisation of enemies has well-known antecedents - not least in Nazi-occupied Ukraine itself, when pre-emptive war was waged against the Red Plague emanating from Moscow - yet these posters have passed without comment. Pora continues to be presented as an innocent band of students having fun in spite of the fact that - like its sister organisations in Serbia and Georgia, Otpor and Kmara - Pora is an organisation created and financed by Washington.

The Real Dissidents-Alternative Voices on Eastern Europe

For those interested in the geopolitics and struggle for mastery through control of oil and gas in Eurasia, the American writer William F Engdahl has a website here with interesting observations on Colour Revolutions.

Global Research is another website with plenty of interesting writers, some far better than others, who grub for those facts that undermine official propaganda about 'The War on Terror' and the connections between NATO expansion, pipeline diplomacy, drug trafficking and terrorism.

Energy Security and Afghanistan-A View from Poland.

In a war for democracy, why worry about public opinion?

Escalation in Afghanistan is aimed at rescuing the credibility of western power, whatever Afghans or westerners might want.

So reads a column by Seumas Milne in the Guardian.

When opponents of the Afghanistan War in Britain try to stimulate opposition to it it is interesting how their arguments about dead troops, casualties and the futility of trying to impose a Western style democracy compare with the mood of apathy combined with incomprehension that is as common in Poland.

The difference is that in Poland few feel the need to organise and protest in the streets as they do in London and only then because the opposition is led by embittered fanatics and professional propagandists and choreographers of the Stop the War Coalition, a motley array of Communists and Islamists.

Public opposition to the NATO War in Afghanistan is against it in every nation that has committed forces. In Poland, which has 2000 troops there, latest public opinion polls indicate that the majority of Poles are against with 81 percent of respondents in TNS OBOP poll favoring their withdrawal.

The reason is not just that 15 Polish soldiers have died on missions in Afghanistan but because the real reason for being there is unmentionable and considered too complicated to explain to the public whose consent is irrelevant where all mainstream political parties support the Afghanistan War.

As in Britain the discussion amongst the political elites revolves more around the conduct of the war but the reasons given are all the more arcane in Poland because the justification of 'the war on terror' can hardly be invoked where there is no domestic 'Islamist' threat.

The obvious reason NATO is in Afghanistan is not even mentioned by Seumas Milne, which is surprising given his Marxist-Leninist world view which provides the oversimplified rationale for terrorism within 'the West' by reversing official propaganda only to substitute it for more propaganda,

Now we are told it is a war to prevent al-Qaida-inspired terrorism on the streets of London, which shamelessly turns reality on its head. There were no such attacks before 2001, and both bombers and intelligence agencies have repeatedly identified the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan as a central motivation for those who try to launch them.

That fails to explain why Poland with one of the highest contingent of troops in both Afghanistan and Iraq has not been targeted by Al Qaida if it was merely a case that foreign policies that are not popular with Muslims causes the terror threat.

If that was the case Milne would need to explain why there has not been a terror attack in Poland and that would reveal the danger inherent in his "explanation" as there are by contrast with Britain, hardly any Muslims in Poland with roots in Asia.

Instead of fearmongering and exploiting the feeling of unease about the war and its consequences to hammer home propaganda according to predetermined ideological agenda, it is essential to understand the war is about geopolitics and energy security.

There is almost no mention or discussion in the media on how Afghanistan fits in with the great Game for the control of Caspian oil and gas or how the military actions in Helmland are connected to the TAPI pipeline scheduled to be built through it in 2010.

There is absolutely no recognition that these geostrategic aims dominate priorities in Afghanistan and that they necessarily undercut the very 'stability' that NATO seeks to create. The pipeline could at least get a mention for that reason.

For all pipeline states are dominated by factions trying to overthrow the leadership or doing dirty deals as politics becomes just the way to gain control over the distribution of the transit fees.

The same is true of Georgia which is why there is a cycle of authoritarian repressions and uprisings since the BTC pipeline was built and which has continued irrespective of the 'Rose Revolution' of 2003.

According to petro-economist John Foster in his Pipeline Through a Troubled Land converting Afghanistan into an 'energy bridge' is likely to bring still more problems than it solves.

It will entrench the power of clans and warlords and the role of opium in financing opposition to those who get the transit fees worth up to $160 million dollars, a lot of money in an impoverished Afghanistan.

The Taliban will then have to threaten the pipeline with destruction to destroy the existing political set up whilst it derives most of it's revenue from opium farming and heroin trafficking, supplying the drugs bored consumers in the West crave.

Naturally, the USA could have just done the pipeline deal with the Taliban without invading in 2001 but the attacks of 9/11 proved that the Taliban were unreliable and that the West needed to impose stability if the pipeline could be built.

It is believed that this would bind Afghanistan to the West and connect neighbouring states together, offset the effects of collusion between Russia and China through the SCO negotiated months before 9/11 and be the alternative to the proposed IPI pipeline.

The TAPI pipeline carries Turkmenistan gas directly through Afghanistan without it going through either Russia or Iran. It gives NATO a stake in all future developments in the Caspian without which these states could move closer to an energy hungry China.

Milne is partly correct when he mentions the threat to NATO's credibility if it pulls out of Afghanistan.

The 'surge' in Afghanistan is designed to prove that 'stability' can be enforced and NATO is a reliable partner in ensuring the TAPI can be guarded.

From Afghanistan to Kosovo, it has been regional stability and the contruction of pipeline networks that bypass Russia and connect Europe to Central Asia that are central to NATO.

When Madelaine Albright spoke in 1999 of NATO 'credibility' in stopping the Balkan Wars she meant NATO's capacity to enforce and protect Western interests.

In Kosovo the threat was to Macedonia and the corridor taking the pipeline from Bulgaria through to Albania from the Black Sea to the Adriatic ( the AMBO pipeline ).

In Georgia, the desire to join NATO and NATO's enthusiasm is part of the plan to expand and project NATO power through the Caucasus into Central Asia.

Here the protection NATO can afford is connected to the BTC pipeline which connects the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea and thence to 'the stans'.

The real reason why Afghanistan is turning into 'another Iraq' or another Vietnam' is because the humanitarian justification was an ethical fig leaf for strategic advancement of Western energy security.

Energy has become an issue of strategic discussions at NATO, and the issue was reviewed at the 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest at which Poland's Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski acted as a forthright advocate of Georgia entering NATO.

The Summit Declaration declared that NATO will support the protection of critical energy infrastructure,and that a 'progress report' on energy security be compiled ready for the 2009 Summit.

Two years previous, the 2006 Summit Declaration proclaimed support for a coordinated initiative to advance energy infrastructure security.

Recently NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer has argued that Nato should have an offensive and interventionist role in struggles over resources by protecting oil and gas pipelines identified as critical to the west.

In Lloyd's news article reveals the anxiety of Western businessmen over energy supplies that Scheffer shares when he writes,

In the security business, some crises and challenges pass by fairly quickly; but there are others that are likely to be on our agenda for a long time, and which, therefore, call for a long-term and concerted response. This is the case with energy security.

Although many energy consumers will be relieved that oil prices and other commodities are tumbling on international markets, the factors that have pushed energy security to the top of the agenda are likely to remain with us.

The economies of China and India will continue to grow, and their legitimate quest for reliable sources of supply will no doubt continue. The field of consumers is growing fast; so is demand. For both suppliers and consumers, ensuring reliable supplies is a must.

The Secretary General sees NATO in two roles, protecting the sea lanes from the Middle East against terror attacks and Somali pirates and secondly, something that reveals the true reason for NATO presence in Afghanistan-the aim of

... energy security with our partners from the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Those partners include Qatar, which is the world’s largest producer of liquified natural gas, but also major energy producers in Central Asia such as Kazakhstan or Turkmenistan.

Richard Boucher, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, said in September 2007:

One of our goals is to stabilize Afghanistan, so it can become a conduit and a hub between South and Central Asia so that energy can flow to the south. . . . and so that the countriesof Central Asia are no longer bottled up between two enormous powers of China and Russia, but rather they have outlets to the south as well as to the north and the east and the west.

Richard Boucher asserts that energy security as not being dependent “on any one route, on any one customer, or on any one investor.” He argues that European energy security is important to the United States and also to Europeans and that it “is based on having multiple sources."

U.S. Ambassador Thomas Pickering of the Afghanistan Study Group in Washington, D.C. when Interviewed on CBC's As It Happens (January 30, 2008), said:

Afghanistan is of strategic importance, a failed state in the middle of a delicate and sensitive region that borders on a number of producers of critical energy.

Any assessment of what Afghanistan is really about is hardly worth bothering with unless statements about 'interests'. 'economic development and 'stability' are interpreted in the light of such hard facts.

So for all despite Milne's scorn about 'a war for democracy', democratic legitimacy is underpinned by energy because Western business and lifestyles have been developed around it as Michael T Klare demonstrates in Blood and Oil ( 2005 ).

This unfortunately is especially those like Poland where the energy intensive American model is seen as one to be emulated and global warming is denied by politicians like the Kaczynski twins and shock therapy economist Leszek Balcerowicz

Without it the economy as it has developed since WW2 and with the consumer society, the car, the supermarket and mass tourism, the masses can be rendered so docile that they will not care about the cost of tapping energy reserves in far off lands.

Having missed out on the post 1945 economic boom in Western Europe and having only been without Communism for 20 years, many Poles care little for where the energy comes from and crave Western style comforts and the right to drive ever more popular American SUV's which now clog the streets of Krakow.

Poland as Regional Outpost in an "Americentric " World

George Friedman has written for the New Statesman an interesting, though deeply flawed analysis of Poland's potential role as a global outpost of the USA's bid to preserve its global hegemony. He has outined his vision in a book called The Next 100 Years.

Unfortunately, his grasp of the coming century is as surreal as the present, as though he seems to think the USA is reacting to menacing global trends in Eurasia in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of China as opposed to actively pursuing dominance.

Its primary goal is always to prevent the emergence of a single power that can dominate Eurasia and the European peninsula. With the Soviet Union's collapse, China's limits and the EU's divisions, there is currently no threat of this. So the US has moved to a secondary goal, which is to block the emergence of any regional hegemon that could, in the long term, grow into something more dangerous. The US does what it can to disrupt the re-emergence of Russian national power while building relations with bordering countries such as Poland and Turkey. It encourages unrest in China's border regions, using the ideology of human rights as justification.

Poland's role comes from the fact that the EU will not develop into a competing military power that matches it's economic power vis a vis the USA, though Friedman has nothing to say about how the USA has sought to exploit divisions to that end.

Europe, if it ever coalesced into a unified economic and military power, could certainly challenge the US. However, as we have seen during the recent financial crisis, nationalism continues to divide the continent, even if exhaustion has made that nationalism less virulent.

Friedman also gets it badly wrong when he asserts,

Eurasia, broadly understood, is being hollowed out. China is far weaker than it appears and is threatened with internal instability. The Europeans are divided by old national patterns that prevent them from moving in a uniform direction. Russia is using the window of opportunity presented by the US absorption in disrupting the Islamic world to reclaim its sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union.

That contradicts the amount of time, money and attention paid to ex-Soviet states like Georgia and the promotion of Colour Revolutions. nor can 'the Islamic World' be arbitrarily detached from pivotal geopolitical struggles for a dominant influence in the Caucusus, what Brzezinski terms 'the Eurasian Balkans'.

Friedman does, however, touch on the aspirations of Polish leaders like Radek Sikorski's to make Poland an indispensible bridge between West and East along with Turkey, a move that would conclusively reverse and check Russia's pre-eminence in that role since the eighteenth century when Poland was partitioned and Turkey i.e the Ottoman Empire pushed back by Catherine II.

Poland has the 18th-largest economy in the world, the largest among the former Soviet satellites and the eighth-largest in Europe. It is a vital strategic asset for the US. In the emerging competition between the US and Russia, Poland represents the geographical frontier between Europe and Russia and the geographical foundation of any attempt to defend the Baltics. Given the US strategic imperative to block Eurasian hegemons and Europe's unease with the US, the US-Polish relationship becomes critical. In 2008 the US signed a deal with Poland to instal missiles in the Baltic Sea as part of Washington's European missile defence shield, ostensibly to protect against "rogue states". The shield is not about Iran, but about Poland as a US ally - from the American and the Russian points of view.

The shield is not about Poland nor Iran in isolation but because it is part of along term offensive by the USA into Eurasia and a pre-emptive move designed to offset the strategical benefits of collusion between Russia and Iran, one that threatens both European and American energy security and corporate oil and gas interests.

It is curious that Friedman fails to mention oil and gas once, the real source of the contest for primacy in Eurasia ever since Sir Halford MacKinder wrote in 1904 that the key to World Dominance lies with control of the World Island of Eurasia. At the time coal fired battleships were being replaced with oil.

Hence with the destruction of both the Russian Tsarist and Ottoman Empires, MacKinder saw the opportunity to advance control over the oil which fuelled the maintenance of prosperity and Empire, just as it has done increasingly in the course of the twentienth century as the USA took over Britain's imperial role.

MacKinder was British High Commissioner to South Russia (the Caucasus) in 1919 by the Foreign Office at a time whenBritain had troops in Southern Russia and was helping the anti-Bolshevik White Army under the command of General Denikin. Mackinder advised Lord Curzon to recognise the independence of the Caucasian peoples if the Whites won.

As John Laughland asserts ( Is Tskhinvali the Centre of the World ?August 7 2008 ), MacKinder argued that Britain should,

.....create an anti-Bolshevik alliance between an independent Ukraine and the Caucasus states, and maintain control of the railway line between Baku and Batumi to secure oil supplies from the Caspian and to prevent the Bolsheviks from reaching the Black Sea themselves.

It is in the light of this historical and ideological perspective that we need to understand the energetic support given today by American geo-strategists to the accession of the two remaining Black Sea states, Ukraine and Georgia, to NATO.

Like Mackinder, they want to turn the Black Sea into a NATO lake and drive Russia out of her historic territories in Europe. This serves three goals: to protect energy supplies; to help "democratise" (i.e. Westernise) the "Greater Middle East" from Casablanca to Kabul; and to inflict a decisive geo-strategic defeat on Russia.

These goals explain the West's support for the pro-NATO Viktor Yushchenko in Ukraine, and for the Georgian government's determination to reassert control over its two breakaway provinces, Abkazia and South Ossetia, where tensions are even now rising dangerously as tens of people have just been killed in fighting near the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali.

Poland's political elite view Poland's role in promoting the US Empire and dominance of Eurasia as simultaneously that of reasserting its historical role as a Commonwealth srtetching down to the Black Sea and reducing Russia more to the confines of sixteenth century Muscovy, what Brzezinski terms a 'Black Hole', a broken up remnant of an Empire suborned to western interests

None of this intrudes into Friedman's portrayal of the USA's role in Eurasia as "crisis management", though his analysis of Poland's position in a 'neoconservative' conception of the US dominated New World Order is one shared by Radek Sikorski and numerous Warsaw think tanks projectors.

Russia cannot survive its economic and demographic problems indefinitely. China must face its endemic social problems. So, imagine an unstable, fragmented Eurasia. On its rim are three powers - Japan to the east, Turkey to the south and Poland to the west....Poland, locked between Russia and Germany, and far more under US control than the other two, will be a land power.

Friedman gives the Great Game away and at least he shows how the missile shield is about Poland as a US ally and not as defence against Iran. In fact, Sikorski was never able in his 'public diplomacy' to give a clear, logical and consistent reason for the missile shield other than insinuating it was not an offensive measure against Russia but that Poland knew its history.

Sikorski at the level of Poland's domestic politics never referred to the missile shield in the context of Iran, because as has turned out, the missile shield need not be built in Poland if the aim is exclusively to counter the perceived threat of Iran independent of checking the 'resurgence' of Russian power in Eurasia.

The point to note is that for Russia the missile shield was about checking those interests in Eurasia which is why it was opposed to it and why now President Obama believes it can be put on hold until the substative interests of Russia can be met in alliance with the USA until expediency dictates otherwise and the missile shield is technologically viable.

This does not mean the missile shield will not be built because it still can act as a trump card that the USA can wield later should it be technologically proved to be effective. The opposition of Brzezinski to it had nothing to do with it ratcheting up the arms race but that it would do so before the USA had a definite and permanent foothold in Eurasia.

The general plan to dominate Eurasia remains a consistent geopolitical necessity where diversification is necessary to ensure energy security and all the more so in light of the debacle in Iraq and the continued problems in securing Afghanistan through which the TAPI pipeline will run through once it is 'stabilised'.

The quest for energy security and the increased dangers in will bring as competition becomes more pathological with the approach of Peak Oil is seldom connected directly with geopolitics when in fact with any discussion of why Polish troops are fighting and dying in Afghanistan it ought to be the starting point.

That the overdependence of the USA and Western Europe on supplies of oil and gas in Eurasia drives foreign policy is something that is belittled at the cost of having to circumvent mentioning it or dealing with its protean influence on all aspects of politics by ever greater acts of absurd divertions and imaginings, rather as prude Victorians repressed sex from their consciousness.

Friedman demonstrates that when he opines surrealistically,

Imagining a Japanese-Turkish alliance is strange but no stranger than a Japanese-German alliance in 1939. Both countries will be under tremendous pressure from the established power. Both will have an interest in overthrowing the global regime the US has imposed. The risk of not acting will be greater than the risk of acting. That is the basis of war.

That Japan would ally with Turkey against the USA is about as likely as Poland doing the same unless this is propaganda designed to persuade immediate entrance of strategically essential states with regards controlling Eurasia into the EU, where it Turkey be irrevocably locked into the political and economic structures of Europe.

For according to Friedman's 'logic' the fragmentation of Eurasia and the emergence of cynical alliances to preserve its interest in maintaining oil supplies does not seem to apply to the USA which is really following the geopolitical imperative of the Drang Nach Osten that motivated Hitler's foreign policy.

The assumption seems to be that only other powers not subordinated to Western geopolitical alliances carry out acts or treacherous realpolitik, something that ignores Brzezinski's support for dictatorship in the stans, the covert backing of Islamists across Central Asia and the collusion of the CIA with them in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s.

The reason for this is that the USA is regarded as an exceptional power not only in technological terms-being capable of militarising space and having a power over Eurasia that will be untouchable but for the betrayal of Turkey and Japan who potential sinister oriental alliance will be checked by the messianic force of the USA and Poland.

At this point it is striking that Friedman is coming close to an insanity in trying to 'think the unthinkable',

The sheer weight of power that the US and its Polish ally can throw against the Japanese and Turks will be overwhelming. The enemy will be trying to deny the US what it already has, space power, without being able to replace it. The US will win in a war where the stakes will be the world, but the cost will be much less than the bloody slaughters of Europe's world wars. Space does not contain millions of soldiers in trenches. War becomes more humane.

So Poland presumably ought to have the missile shield as some basis for the further development of a Star Wars programme, as space technology fights out an intergalactic war for control and order in the heavens against the intrusion of cosmological demonic forces in the shape of the resurgent oriental hordes.

( With thanks to Olching for bringing Friedman's NS article to my attention )

Those of Us Who Know a Little History

Whilst the Kaminski 'controversy' continues, legitimate criticism of far-right Polish populism seems in some quarters to have acted as a pretext to make blinkered and bigoted swipes at Poland as some sinister den of widespread Jew baiting and clerical fascism.

Hating Poland has a long tradition on the left who until recently tended to regard the Soviet Union as a force for good in containing rabid Polish nationalists who were responsible for thwarting the the victory of universal Communism.

Even when the Poles are not written off by embittered Trotskyists, some on the liberal left like British actor Stephen Fry

Mr Fry was interviewed on Channel 4 news earlier this week by Jon Snow where he attacked the Conservative party’s links with Poland’s Law and Justice party.

The Polish Embassy reacted with fury after he allegedly implied that the Polish nation was responsible for the atrocities at Auschwitz and accused him of “defamation”.

Fry opined,

“There has been a history, lets face it, in Poland, of a right wing Catholicism which has been deeply disturbing for those of us who know a little history and remember which side of the border Auschwitz was on and know the stories and know much of the antisemitic and homophobic and nationalistic elements in countries like Poland.”

First of all, for all the affected pretence of languid Bloomsbury style intellectuality, this sententious waffling dolt does not even know that Auschwitz was in the part of Poland directly annexed to the Third Reich and not in the General Gouvernement.

Secondly, Fry does not seem to understand that many Gentile Poles treated as untermensch also died in Auschwitz and that both they and Poland were in no way responsible for setting up concentration camps or collaborating with the Nazis in doing so.

Fry's comments are on the level of some prattish student who seems to have gleaned their knowledge of Eastern Europe from having watched Borat who does actually pepper his speech with bits of Polish in the film as well as other languages ( he's supposed to be Kazakh )

Every nation has its share of unpleasant people. In Krakow this comes across every time a bunch of loutish Easy Jet Stag Nighters mewls and pukes its way through its streets or when, as one Polish girl told me, one drunken slob asked her 'Are you cheap ?

The stereotypes a significant number of predatory British sex tourists have of Eastern Europe are pretty horrid. Polish women are seen as rasping and horny Slavic sluts just aching to get into bed with a wealthy and 'humourous' Brit whose got wads of cash.

The assumptions of the Stag Night moron reveal the very nasty side of Britain which has pretty much shocked the Poles in Krakow away from the old perception of Englishmen are 'dzentelmen', as if most of them appoximated to the actor Colin Firth.

When asked about why British men behave so badly by annoyed Cracovians I often reply that there is a part of every nation which has its dark side and that Poland also has its fair share of embarassing shaven headed potatoes with leather jackets grunting kurwa and spitting ( cham ).

Polish migrants in London I have known felt a certain cringe when the British labour market was opened and some 'reckless elements' as Kaczynski called them started arriving at Victoria bus station.

As for Stephen Fry I have always though this nauseatingly pretentious 'comic actor' ought to have disappeared into well deserved obscurity over a decade ago after he starred in the 1980s historical comedy series Blackadder.

This annoying persona is a living parody of the 'sensitive' artistic Cambridge and Bloomsbury type he has portrayed in films like the one on Lytton Strachey and Oscar Wilde, the witty spinner of bon mots, the alas haunted victim of the Establishment and rebel against it's cruelty.

This slimy reptilian purveyor of gentile middle class angst is simply not qualified to make statements about the history of the Holocaust just in order to upgrade what a feeling person he is any more than the 'politically committed' actress Venessa Redgrave is on Chechnya.

Norman Davies on the Kaczynski Twins.

Cameron needs to understand that "rightwing" in the countries of the former Soviet Bloc has a very different connotation to that in Britain. Despite the clever packaging, none of the east European members of the ECR have anything remotely similar to the conservative, evolutionary traditions honed over the centuries from Burke to Thatcher. In post-communist Europe, there was little worth conserving. All the groupings concerned, therefore, are upstart radicals who only call themselves rightist because they abhor communism, and because they imagine "the left" to be run by fellow travellers.

Norman Davies is right that Poland lacks a steady conservative tradition. Then again, Cameron is hardly conservative in the Burkean sense either and conservatism no less than social democracy are dying political traditions.

Explaining the Kaczynski twins has to start off by regarding their politics largely as one that exploits a pathological resentment for the disappointed hopes of post-Solidarity and post-Communist Poland.

It is that which accounts for the politics of conspiracism and scapegoating, the idea that cosmopolitan elites or "Them" have betrayed those who fought for Poland's liberty only to find it stripped of its national sovereignty by the EU.

Poland is surrounded by a sea of corruption, by transnational forces that seek to destroy the role of the Catholic faith by deliberately promoting homosexuality, abortion and atheism. Even the more moderate conservative government in Warsaw is part of this plot,

Platforma Obywatelska is having a nightmare, because Cameron's partners, the Law and Justice party, are obstructing its every move, using the president to veto legislation, encouraging strikes and making insinuations about hidden agendas, criminal associations and a secret uklad, or devil's pact, between liberals, post-communists and big business.

Generally Pis politics has been compared with De Valera's Ireland , Franco with Adam Michnik comparing the use of lustration laws and attempts to proscribe books in school to 'ethno-clerical fascism'.

Michnik exaggerated absurdly when he saw the Kaczynski government in 2007 as one attempting a fascist coup that would undo Poland's open society but he did have a point when he compared Pis to the Endecja.

In Heart of Europe: The Past in Poland's Present, Davies draws a continuity between Dmowki's National Democrats of the 1930s and the National Communists of Gomulka.

Both shared the 'Piast' concept of Poland, the idea that Germany was the eternal enemy and that the lands of Silesia were promordially Polish and that ethnic Germans were colonists and had no right to live there.

Echoes of that came across when the Kaczynski's made noises about the Germans wanting to use their financial power to colonise Poland again and that they should have no right to buy Polish property

One of the absurd ironies of the Polish populist right as represented by the Kaczynski twins is the way their politics has replicated the paranoia and witch hunting mentality that was prevalent under the Communist system they detest.

Davies dissects the Kaczynski twins politics with droll precision when he writes,

Anyone trying to subject the policies of Law and Justice to serious analysis , therefore, is condemned to a headache. One would have to conclude that it leans to both right and left simultaneously, showing nationalist traits in some regards and socialist traits in others.

Researchers would be better advised, however, to weigh the unique advantages of a party run in the interests of identical twins – its leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Poland's president Lech Kaczyski. One twin can play the hard line and the other the soft line. One can be rightist, the other leftist. One lives with his cat. The other is a family man. One sounds pro-European, and his brother today sounds Eurosceptic. In short, they can be all things to all people.

This is all true. They are populists who simply wish to retain power at one level but their ability as politicians lies in their ability to tap into the fundamentalist mindset of a substantial number of Poles.

This consists of taking an utterly intransigent position and obstinately refusing to listen to what others actually say, something that can be gleaned by watching Polish politicians on TVN or TVP.

There is no calm discussion but simply a bunch of neurotic muppets shouting over one another. The pantomime quality of Polish politics has just led to many simply to switch off.

Put simply there is no developed political discourse and with regards foreign policy only politicians who uncritically and subserviently follow Washington, as the Polish satellite state did with regards Moscow.

The reason for that lies in the persistence of Cold Warrior poses irrespective of whether the politics is left, liberal or right. Michnik himself embodies that tendency in being a staunch and uncritical backer of the USA's "War on Terror"

Poland is an ally of the United States of America. It was our duty to show that we are a reliable, loyal, and predictable ally. America needed our help, and we had to give it.

Histrionics seem to appeal in Poland. Michnik has a steak of the poseur about him and it ought not to be forgotten that the twins before moving into politics were child actors starring in the film The Boys who Stole the Moon.

Nor have the twins lost their penchant for dramatic acting whilst in power. As Davies writes,

....they foster a visceral dislike of anything reminiscent of liberalism, compromise, or balance....They owe their careers to the Solidarity leader, Lech Walesa, who duly fired them for troublemaking. They promptly burned Walesa's effigy in public, and have routinely denounced him as a communist agent.

They owed their election in 2005 to a promised coalition with Civic Platform. Having scraped a win with the help of the ultra-Catholic Radio Maria, they then formed a government on their own. The party then let slip that it was not inclined to change Poland's longstanding legislation on abortion.

The twins next forged a coalition with two fringe nationalist parties, their former opponents; this came to grief when they tried to plant a bribe on their own deputy prime minister and sent in the equivalent of the armed anti-terror squad to arrest him. In the last week, a Polish newspaper has linked their group with a rumoured coup d'etat.

It is about time someone with a real knowledge of Poland wrote about the farcical and treacherous nature of the twins and why David Cameron's pan-European alliance will come to grief without the usual exaggerations about how PiS is some massed neo-Fascist threat.

Polish Politicians Fulminate over Obama's "Betrayal".

Despite the fact that most of the Polish populace has expressed that it does not want the US missile shield to be located in Poland, this has not stopped Polish politicians looking very foolish after having unconditionally endorsed it or believing that the USA was especially interested in Poland per se as it's staunchest ally only for it to be dropped without being directly consulted.

If Obama has seen fit to shelve it for now, at least in Poland and the Czech Republic, this makes those like Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski appear far more fanatical than the US in wanting to have it when, as it turns out, it was not so essential for security after all and could just as well be built anywhere, whether at sea or in the North Pole.

The Missile Shield was never about the security of Poland. It was about advancing US hegemony in Central Asia and to do so it appeared to US strategists that having a missile shield in Poland would ramp up the tensions between it and Russia sufficient to push through bsing it in a place stratically convenient and with a nationalist hatred of Russia that lay deep in history.

For Poland's Sikorski it a blow to his neoconservative plan to make his nation a regional power with a leverage over Eastern Europe and a greater role in promoting its historic influence over Ukraine, Belarus and the Black Sea. That and the profit and prestige to be had from having the missile shield.

Sikorski is very close to the neoconservatives in Washington. He is a member of the American enterprise Institute, a think tank that includes all those who were the architects of George Bush's disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the most extreme advocates of the Project for the New American Century-Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, David 'Axis of Evil' Frum.

Sikorski, who was not happy about Obama's election victory in the USA, told newspaper Rzeczpospolita, "It is time now for a mature look, stripped of illusions, at our possibilities and our future. I think today we all know that if we are to look to somebody, we have to look to ourselves."

This statement is clear nonsense as Poland has been part of NATO since 1999 and Article 5 means that any attack by Russia on Poland would result in a collective response from all NATO states, so the propaganda about Poland being sacrificed as it was continually throughout its history and especially during the Cold War is simply untrue.

It is true that a significant number of Poles have been continually subject to propaganda which bangs on about Russia being a threat. But far from Russia being so, the USA has also realised that needlessly antagonising Russia could actually set back its plans to carve out deals with putin with regards their oil and gas interests in Central Asia.

The ultimate aim of US policy is to prevent collusion between Russia and Iran and China. The fear of a nuclear Iran is less to do with an arms race, at least one from which the USA does not benefit, but the fear that Beijing will gain more influence and Iran more independence by having nuclear power ( which might be used for contructing a nuclear bomb ).

If the missile shield guaranteed that result the Obama administration would pursue it and it has not ruled out that it is one option amongst many to acheive is geostrategic aims.

With regards Poland, it is seen as a blow to it's pride and to the public diplomacy of Donald Tusk, Sikorski and others who still see Poland's strategic position in outmoded Cold War postures of containing "Russian Imperialism" whilst sending Polish troops to Afghanistan in what is in reality an Imperial War to ensure the construction of the TAPI pipeline.

The Russian threat is always convenient because it means Sikorski, the political elite and a pliant media never have to vex the minds of the Polish people with the reality of the geostrategy behind the war in Afghanistan nor the fact it is part of the same drive to the East in which the missile shield plays a part.

Witold Waszczykowski, deputy head of Poland's national security bureau thus complained "Is it appeasement toward Russia? Is it pragmatism? Is it transactional?"

In reality it is pragmatic and transactional but then there is no reason to complain given that Sikorski is always talking about how in dealing with Russia, Poland is following a 'pragmatic' policy, not least given the amount of trade between Poland and Russia and the fact that prominent Warsaw lobbies favour a realistic policy towards Russia.

All of which makes the bogus historical parallels with "appeasement" redundant because there are no territorial claims to be "appeased" with respect to Russia.

If the missile shield was about only defence against Iran, then Sikorski ought to have had no complaints about US 'betrayal' because the shield can still be operated from seaborne vessels. Yet Sikorski always maintained security against Russia was important. Yet Russia did not threaten to aim its missiles at Poland until Polish politicians agreed to host it.

Sikorski had to create the following pseudo-realistic scenario thus to justify it,

"What you have to understand is that this is purely defensive in nature. The system will only react if we, Nato, are threatened. Should we be fearful of Russia's response? Well, we have always lived in the shadow of Russia."

Yet 'we' does not include all NATO states. It was never the unanimous will of all NATO states to have the missile shield, which makes Sikorski's comments reflect the worst aspects of Polish bravado that Westerners have always criticised, often unjustly, but which do, as with all stereotypes have some basis in fact and in some part of the Polish mentality.

Yet to single out Warsaw for a their one sided view of the missile shield as "defensive" would be to omit the scale of the subliminal propaganda in Britain too. The Guardian's Ian Traynor on reporting that Obama had scrapped the missile shield wrote on September 17 2009,

The shift is a triumph for the Kremlin, which has long and vehemently argued that the shield is aimed at neutralising its intercontinental missiles; Moscow had warned of a return to a cold war arms race, and threatened to deploy nuclear missiles in its Kaliningrad exclave, surrounded by EU states.

It was not a victory for Moscow because the Kremlin was reacting to a neoconservative policy formulated in Washington and based on reheated 'Cold war rhetoric about Russia as the Evil Empire. It was in response to Washington and Warsaw's agressive first move and willingness to resurrect the arms race that it sought to counter the missile shield.

For the very term 'missile shield' ignores the fact that the base could easily be used for offensive postures. It remains 'defensive' only as part of a longer term offensive strategy of projecting NATO and US power deep into the Eurasian Heartland, just as the British Empire sought to in its day through repeated attempts to control Afghanistan.