What's driving Europe's rightward shift?

Traces of China In Europe ••• Traces of China 01: Gardens

 

In the early 1700s, a radical new garden style arose in England and dramatically overhauled centuries of rigid French and Italian styles that dominated the gardens of Europe. In this episode we unveil the captivating story of how Chinese influences have subtly dug their way into the fabric of England's cherished country gardens. We trace the historical voyage of exotic plants from the Far East to the rolling landscapes of English estates. 

Through interviews with experts and stunning visuals of gardens adorned with Chinese-inspired elements, we celebrate this cross-cultural pollination that continues to shape the timeless allure of English gardens.

Fascists + Centrists = NeoLiberalism = Doom!!!

Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) • Western Europeans should learn from SCO, lean away from the USA's influence and dismantle its military bases in Europe.

Thanks to Gaza, European philosophy has been exposed as ethically bankrupt • From Heidegger's Nazism to Habermas's Zionism, the suffering of the 'Other' is of little consequence.

Imagine if Iran, Syria, Lebanon, or Turkey - fully backed, armed and diplomatically protected by Russia and China - had the will and the wherewithal to bomb Tel Aviv for three months, day and night, murder tens of thousands of Israelis, maim countless more and make millions homeless, and turn the city into a heap of uninhabitable rubble, like Gaza today.

Just imagine it for a few seconds: Iran and its allies deliberately targeting populated parts of Tel Aviv, hospitals, synagogues, schools, universities, libraries - or indeed any populated place - to ensure maximum civilian casualties. They would tell the world they were just looking for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet.  

Ask yourself what the US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia and Germany in particular would do within 24 hours of the onslaught of this fictional scenario. 

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The world has been awoken from the false slumber of European ethno-philosophy. Today, we owe this liberation to the global suffering of…Palestinians, whose…heroism & sacrifices have finally dismantled the barefaced barbarity…of “western civilisation”.https://t.co/3o8ob3PToi

— Jairo I Fúnez-Flores (@Jairo_I_Funez) January 18, 2024

 

Total Depravity and Moral Collapse...

I remember 1967. At 13, I naively believed the very explicit promises that Israel would quickly withdraw from all the occupied territories very soon. That was the end game. A lifetime has passed since then.

— Andrew Kadel @DrewKadel@social.coop (@FrKadel) January 18, 2024

Who is really 'wrecking' Europe? | Mark LeVine || Aljazeera

The 'nationalist onslaught' is a symptom, not a cause of Europe's crisis.

by Mark LeVine

"The idea of Europe is in peril."

So wrote 30 leading intellectuals in the Guardian last week - including an assortment of Nobel laureates and other literary prize winners and a sprinkle of philosophers - as the threat of Brexit and the May European Parliament elections loom on the horizon.

Europe indeed appears to be in bad shape. An Italian-Austrian-Hungarian-Polish axis of xenophobic populism is coalescing in the heart of the continent, Swedish Democrats are threatening to derail what's left of the quintessential European liberal welfare state in the north, and a powerful far right is tearing apart the centrist German political establishment. To the west, Brexit UK and Trumpian US are a cause of much anxiety, to the east, scheming Russia and an increasingly authoritarian Turkey are a constant source of tension. And from the south, millions of forced migrants are on the move seeking safe haven on European shores.

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What is Europe?

It's too much to ask a manifesto-like polemic to provide a monograph's worth of historical analysis. But acknowledging and accounting for Europe's bastardised, highly problematic history is, in fact, a sine qua non for moving towards the liberal Imaginarium the signatories seek to enable. 

Laying aside the evident elision in the text between Europe and the EU (which isn't mentioned in the manifesto though it's clearly the idea more in danger today), even the origin of the word points to a core problem faced by "European patriots" such as the signatories.

Did Europe arise from the idea of "eruba", the Akkadian/Mesopotamian term for the western horizon or the Phoenician "erub" meaning evening or west? And did the Ancient Greeks adopt it into the myth about Phoenician princess Europa of Sidon (modern-day Lebanon), who was kidnapped by Zeus and brought to Crete? Or did they come up with the word combining "eurus" (broad) and "opt" (eye)?

Although various uses of the word can be found as far back as the Roman Empire and became more common with the Reformation, it was Napoleon who first imagined a politically "United States of Europe" with one overarching identity and set of laws and culture. In the centuries before and after Napoleon's grand imperial vision, millions would die fighting over precisely who had a legitimate right to define European identity. That definition was never arrived to.

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By the early 20th century, well over a million poor Europeans wound up in North Africa, with cities like Tunis, Tripoli and Alexandria becoming home to hundreds of thousands of Italians, Greeks, French, Maltese and other migrants from the north. At the same time, both France and Italy offered at some point full citizenship to colonised Algerians and Libyans ("Muslim Italians" as Benito Mussolini would say) in return for supporting continued metropolitan rule. 

From illiberal empires to neoliberal fantasies

Indeed, Europe's colonial past is also completely absent from the discourse of the manifesto, even though the "idea" of Europe has always been inseparable from the nearly half millennium of inhumanly brutal, massively exploitative and often genocidal imperialism, colonialism and slavery. 

In this context, it's tellingly ironic that when the Italian deputy prime minister, Luigi di Maio, wanted to blame France for the migrant crisis that has sent untold tens of thousands of Africans towards Italy's shores, he accused the French government of "taking the lead" in "never stopp[ing] colonising tens of African states" and "impoverishing Africa." "Africans should be in Africa," he continued, "not at the bottom of the Mediterranean." Of course, Italy was no less brutal in its own colonial wars and rule in Africa (nor were any other European colonial powers). 

Ultimately, Europe is both deeply and implicately related (to borrow a sadly underused concept from Israeli geographer Juval Portugali) to its Muslim and African neighbours and could not have become the bastion of liberal and Enlightenment ideals the present manifesto's signatories rightly strive for without the massive violence perpetrated or supported by European states during the last half millennium.

More to the current point, the financial and broader corporate elites of every EU member state have benefited greatly from the policies of neoliberal "openness", "export-led-growth" and "foreign investment" imposed on the very countries that currently threaten to flood it with refugees, often with the support of brutal and corrupt authoritarian regimes that enriched themselves mightily in the process. 

None of this is mentioned in the manifesto, even though the policies at the root of the political "wreckage" across Europe today lie in neoliberal policies, which, in fact, have been visited directly upon European populations as well. Indeed, neoliberalism in the Euro-American contexts can be well understood as the application of colonial ideologies and policies to metropolitan populations.

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