english nationalism

The European Union adopts a besieged fortress mentality – a mirror image of Tory Brexit

Rupen Savoulian Uncategorized , , , , , , ,

Let’s start with a thought experiment which will provide a basis for this article regarding the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. There is a political state that is preaching against the inclusion of outsiders, and adopts harsh militaristic measures to ensue their exclusion. Motivated by a paranoid xenophobia, the laws being passed serve to isolate the political state, while domestically disseminating anti-immigrant propaganda.

What state am I talking about?

Is it:

A) Formerly Communist Albania led by its long term isolationist leader Enver Hoxha?

B) Tory Brexit Britain, or

C) the current European Union?

Timofey Bordachev, scholar at the Valdai Club, proposes the comparison between the EU’s Russophobic policies, and the nearly paranoid nationalism of formerly Communist Albania, led by its partisan leader Enver Hoxha (in power 1945 – 85). Derided as a totalitarian dictatorship, cultivating a national sense of suspicion of anything Western, Hoxha constructed a highly secretive state which rejected any perceived capitalist influences.

Enver Hoxha, in one respect, had good reasons to be highly suspicious of the West. He led a life-and-death struggle of the Albanian partisans against the exterminationist policies of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in World War 2. If the Albanian partisans, and their Yugoslav counterparts had lost, the nations of the Balkans would have been reduced to impoverished colonies, depopulated by their fascist overlords.

Hoxha and the partisans were formed by, and fought in, the crucible of WW2. His vision of a postwar Communist Albania was formed in these years. Loyalty to Stalin was paramount in his ideology – any deviation, such as that of his fellow Yugoslav partisans – was regarded by him with hostility.

Albania in the immediate postwar period refused to join Yugoslavia. The friction with Belgrade resulted in Tirana completely severing relations with their erstwhile Yugoslav comrades. Loyal to Stalin until the end, Hoxha defied the imperialist West, and what he regarded as Yugoslavia’s anti-Stalinist turn to the capitalist nations.

In the aftermath of the 1948 Soviet Yugoslav dispute, Hoxha continued on the Stalinist path, even though that put his regime on a collision course with his more powerful Yugoslav neighbour.

Insistent that Albanians govern themselves, he rejected the intrusion of Western corporations into Albania.

As an example, one can of imported Coca Cola could land an Albanian in prison, the latter an example of the capitalist degeneration Hoxha opposed. There was no McDonald’s, no KFC or Pepsi in Communist Albania. I am not imputing unique powers of observation or sociological judgement to Hoxha, but today we see the impact of decades of ultra processed foods on public health.

Hoxha’s regime was swept up in the general crisis of the Eastern bloc regimes in 1989-91. His extreme isolationism and paranoid suspicion of the West were cited as one of the main reasons for Albania’s rapid socioeconomic transformation and opening up to the club of Western European capitalist states.

Why is this important? Albania’s self-imposed isolation, while of historical interest, also contains lessons for today.

Earlier I mentioned the Valdai Club. What is that? A semi-official Kremlin-linked think tank, its conferences and papers reflect the thinking of Russia’s oligarchy. It is in many ways a counterpart to the US-based Atlantic Council; though the Valdai Club’s participants have never engaged in regime change.

Bordachev, in a recent article, asks if the EU is copying hypersensitive isolationism of communist Albania. While he asks a valid question, his proposed answer of Russophobia leaves a lot to be desired. It is incontrovertible that Russophobic feelings and policies have increased among European Union member states since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

However, that answer is the equivalent of taking the wrong off-ramp from the motorway. The EU’s xenophobic paranoia is targeted at nonwhite refugees and asylum seekers. Demonised in the corporate media as a threat, parasites living off the public purse, the EU nations have spent billions militarising the Schengen zone borders. The Mediterranean has been transformed into a maritime barrier that dwarfs the former Berlin Wall by comparison.

It is not only the rich nations of Western Europe that have relentlessly promoted a toxic debate about the supposed threat of migration and refugees. Hungary, led by long term ultrarightist president and Russian ally Viktor Orban, has spent his political career propagating a besieged fortress mentality among his fellow Europeans.

Officially adopting the far right conspiracy theory of the ‘great replacement’, Orban rails against the influx of Middle Eastern and North African refugees. Since he assumed office in 2010, Orban has portrayed Europe in white Christian nationalist terms, bemoaning the trickle of refugees from Muslim majority nations. Locked in a struggle against the forces of Islam, so Orban tells us, Europe must protect its Christian roots, drawing from an Islamophobic clash-of-civilisations view of history.

Ironically, while Orban never hesitates in advocating anti-Islamic themes and imagery, he deftly attracts investment and economic opportunities from Turkey, cynically manoeuvring to normalise the historic Ottoman Turkish presence in Hungary. In that way, he mollifies concerns about his Islamophobic message for his Turkish partners.

Tory Brexit was, in its own way, a reflection of paranoid hypernationalism turned inward against the European project itself. Rather than questioning the economic and political policies of the EU, Brexit redefined the boundaries of its anti-immigrant fortress.

If EU policies demonised the nonwhite outsider, and cultivated a sense of being under siege, then English Euroskeptics did not take long to apply the same logic to the UK’s position in Europe.

The Yugoslav partisans, and their Albanian allies, fought for a multinational and multiconfessional formation. Their vision, while incorporating nationalist opposition to foreign occupation, looked forward to a state where ethnicities enjoyed multiracial equality. There is a refugee crisis in Europe, but it is not caused by the refugee or migrant arrivals. The crisis is the EU’s fortress mentality which perpetuates the mistreatment and incarceration of refugees.

Shakespeare comes to Baghdad – the Iraq war continues

Rupen Savoulian Uncategorized , ,

William Shakespeare (1564-1616), the great English playwright and dramatist, wrote a number of historical plays concerning various periods in English history. These plays are not as well known and less-frequently performed than his comedies, tragedies and romantic works. One of his main historical plays is Henry VI (Parts one, two and three). The play examines the course of English political and social life after the death of King Henry V, and the effects of English losses in the Hundred Years’ War. England had lost the bulk of its territories in France, and the political repercussions in England manifested themselves in a series of intrigues and machinations by various factions of the English ruling class. These conflicts reached a head with the Wars of the Roses, when two competing branches of the one royal family (the Plantagenets) fought an inter-dynastic civil war for political and economic supremacy.

Parts Two and Three of the Henry VI trilogy examine the role of the King, his inability to stabilise the political situation, the arming of the various rival houses (Lancaster and York), and the eventual explosion of armed conflict. It is a gripping, tumultuous series of plays, at once enthralling and disturbing. The infighting among the English landed nobility in the wake of English losses of land and resources in France is portrayed sharply by Shakespeare, and evokes powerful emotions. What happens to the ordinary people of a country when its ruling class fragments into warring factions? After inciting English nationalism for a war of conquest in France, once the territories are lost, all nationalist feeling evaporates. The welfare of England as a nation is no longer the paramount objective, but the advancement of the narrow, sectional interests of various factions of the dynastic clans that made up the ruling elite of England.

What is the relevance of this historical play for contemporary times? Patrick Cockburn, the expert foreign correspondent for The Independent states it plainly:

Want to know what Iraq is like now? Check out ‘Henry VI’, parts I, II and III

That is the title of his article in The Independent online newspaper, where he examines the eerie similarities between the conflict for supremacy in Baghdad with the historical account of the fight for victory within the English ruling dynasty during the Wars of the Roses. The corporate media has largely ignored the human tragedies of the Iraq war since 2008, mainly because of a well-crafted myth; the surge. The addition of an extra 30 000 American troops in Iraq back in 2007, so the story goes, successfully reduced insurgent attacks on US troops, providing extra muscle to deal with the Iraqi insurgent groups. Actually, as Mike Whitney explains in his article in Counterpunch, the ‘surge’ was a publicity exercise aimed at disguising the shift in tactics of the American military. What actually occurred was the ethnic and sectarian cleansing of Baghdad. Whitney goes on to detail how the US political and military leadership, faced with a stubborn insurgency that could not be defeated, changed tactics to one of ethnic divide-and-rule. The US created sectarian-based death squads from the local population, mainly from the Shia community, and sent them to fight and torture insurgents.

The change in tactics was not accidental, because the US has vast experience in training and arming para-military death squads that operate outside the law – they have been using this tactic for years in many Latin American countries. In fact, the main American military commander in Iraq at the time, General David Petraeus, employed Colonel James Steele, a retired US Special Forces veteran. Steele has had vast experience in death squad tactics, because he actually studied and implemented counterinsurgency warfare in El Salvador back in the 1980s. Now the Pentagon is (ostensibly) investigating the links between the torture chambers in Iraq and the political and military leadership of the United States. There cannot be any cross-sectarian reconciliation in Iraq until all the details about the torture chambers and death squads of the US dirty war in Iraq are fully exposed and culprits punished.

The irony of the situation is that prior to the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, there was no sectarian animosity. Various ethnic communities mingled, intermarried and did business together. Under the rule of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni privileged-elite did emerge, but that was based more on the political loyalty to the Ba’athist party. To advance in Ba’athist-dominated Iraq, joining the military or the police was the surest way to gain steady employment and benefits.

With the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US military and political command fueled sectarian hatred in order to divert the energies of the largely Sunni-led insurgency. What has all this got to do with the surge and the apparent reduction in US casualties? As Mike Whitney explains in his Counterpunch article, the main Shia insurgent force, the Madhi Army led by nationalist and populist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr declared a ceasefire for a year. The US military authorities bought off a section of the Sunni insurgency by enlisting them in so-called ‘Awakening Councils’ to attack and defeat al-Qaeda linked groups. The systematic ethnic cleansing of Iraqi Sunnis from Baghdad, carried out by the Shia-dominated regime of current Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, was well underway in 2007 and 2008. These factors combined succeeded in reducing the number and intensity of attacks on US troops. The vaunted ‘surge’ did have a purpose;

the surge was used to cover an equally-heinous war crime, the massive ethnic cleansing of Baghdad’s Sunni population, millions of who were either killed, tortured or forced to flee to Jordan or Syria.

The entire article by Mike Whitney can be read here in Counterpunch online.

Failure to address the crimes of ethnic cleansing, torture and rendition makes a mockery of US claims to have brought democracy to Iraq. The recent protests, mainly by Iraqi Sunnis, have attempted to combat the sectarianism of the Maliki administration and has gained the support of the Shia cleric and politician Muqtada al-Sadr. Into this political powder-keg, Sunni extremist groups (linked to the petro-monarchies in Saudi Arabia and Qatar) are trying to stoke the fires of a Sunni-based sectarian backlash. Reconciliation will be impossible unless the criminal role of the United States is fully revealed and the perpetrators brought to justice.

Let us make one last observation; David Frum, the Bush-Cheney administration speechwriter and author of the now-famous phrase ‘Axis of Evil’, has just written an article confirming what the anti-war movement stated was the main motivation of the American drive to war. The anti-war activists were routinely vilified, ridiculed and slandered for even daring to suggest one overriding motivation for the US to occupy Iraq. While all wars have multiple motivations and agendas, reflecting the priorities of the various factions of the ruling class, the one claim for this Iraq war (the claim most stigmatised and attacked) has now been confirmed by Frum; Iraq would be an additional reservoir of oil as an alternative to exclusive dependency on Saudi Arabia.

Read the whole article by Glenn Greenwald here.