The United States is “back,” proclaims U.S. President Joe Biden, seemingly as often as he can. The coming week will show if the same is true of the West. At successive summits of the G-7, NATO and the European Union, Biden and fellow leaders will confront a dual task: reviving the community of advanced market democracies and showing that the West is capable of resolving today’s complex transnational challenges.
Developments on the world stage are stunning. Almost every day, geopolitical incidents and moves are appearing magical.
The developments are challenging the Empire’s geopolitics in regions. Months ago, the Empire gave an impression that it’ll regain ground whatever has been lost, prestige that slipped down from its crown. Immediate moves were taken, at least for public view. Those were image-rebuilding moves, and some other “things”.
Margrethe Vestager said that while she was Interior Minister her responsibilities did not include overseeing the activities of Danish intelligence services.
On Thursday, European Commission (EC) Vice President Margrethe Vestager explained that while she was Denmark’s Interior Minister, she was not responsible for overseeing her country’s intelligence services, which allegedly collaborated with the United States to spy on other European countries.
Posing the Question
This year marks the 57th anniversary of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964). This text, although plagued with a pessimistic spirit, was a great source of inspiration for the development of the New Left and the May 68 uprisings. The question we must ask ourselves is whether a text that predates the last 50 years of neoliberalism has any pertinent take-aways for today’s revolutionary struggles. Before we examine this, let us first review the context and central observations in Marcuse’s famed work.
The NSA would have used the Danish IT infrastructure to spy on Angela Merkel and other European leaders.
The Danish public television DR and other European media on Sunday published an investigation showing that the Danish Defense Intelligence Service (FE) gave the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) open internet access to spy on top politicians of neighboring countries, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Une tribune du général François Gaubert
En tant que général signataire de la lettre ouverte dite des généraux – laquelle en fait est celle de plusieurs milliers d’anciens militaires de tous grades, ce qui en fait la valeur – je souhaiterais apporter un éclairage complémentaire mais essentiel au paragraphe évoquant « l’intervention de nos camarades d’active ».
La France a longtemps été connue pour sa démographie dynamique. Mais des signes très préoccupants d’un dérèglement apparaissent ces dernières années, alerte le haut-commissaire au Plan François Bayrou. Les critiques lui ont reproché de vouloir ouvrir grand les vannes de l’immigration. Or le rapport ne dit pas vraiment cela.
When Rachid Zerrouki, a teacher in Marseille, headed back to his classroom last Monday, he braced himself for the worst. He hadn’t seen his students since the brutal killing of Samuel Paty, a 47-year-old middle school teacher in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, who was beheaded by a young Chechen refugee days after he showed his class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad during a lesson about freedom of expression. With school back in session after a holiday break, the Education Ministry had instructed teachers to have students participate in a minute of silence to express solidarity with Paty and all teachers throughout France.
It is necessary to keep an eye on the other strategies of the New Right and populists, to protect the political culture from a change towards right-wing ideas.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, a key topic of discussion in the media was the growing impact of populism on political culture and the political order. The February 2020 election of Thomas Kemmerich of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) as Minister-President of the federal state of Thuringia in Germany gained international attention, as it marked the first time since the Second World War that a candidate was elected head of state government by the Christian Democrats (CDU), the liberals (FDP) and the right-wing, and partly right-extremist, party Alternative for Germany (AfD) by a ‘parliamentary trick’ — AfD members did not vote for their own candidate but unexpectedly shifted their votes to the liberal candidate, Kemmerich. This was contrary to common political behaviour in Germany.
L’écologie devait faire partie des grands chantiers du quinquennat. Dans son dépassement de la droite et de la gauche, Macron prenait en compte l’urgence environnementale et souhaitait la dépolitiser, l’aborder de manière pragmatique et changer réellement les choses. Enfin, ça c’est ce qu’il disait. C’est fou, ce que Macron aura dit comme choses et aura fait le contraire depuis quatre ans en matière d’écologie, mais aussi de démocratie sociale, de sauvegarde de l’Etat providence, de lois sociétales enlisées sur le cannabis et la PMA… Des lois qui devaient au moins donner le change à son électorat bourgeois progressiste et montrer qu’il était moderne, tellement moderne !