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Showing posts with the label "european union"
This is a good picture of Britain's political-economic situation There is a historical background prior to 2016 and the crisis that led to Brexit. "There was now a clear division between those leaders who represented the interests of big business and the City of London wanting ‘free trade’ and a big role in the EU and rank and file Conservatives who    represented small businesses and the narrow nationalist and racist elements in small provincial towns. They wanted no truck with ‘Europe’ and harkened back to ‘good old days’ of a white imperial Britain ploughing its own furrow – something, of course, that had disappeared even before the UK joined the EU. This division was heightened by the bulk of the ‘popular’ press, whose moguls were either Australian-Americans like Rupert Murdoch, or aristocratic empire believers like the Rothermeres or the Barclay brothers." The analysis also includes the impacts of "no-deal Brexit" on business and labour. A crucial ar...
Lithuania and Romania complict in CIA toture? So what? Haven't they helping the West protect its way of life from "Islam and its war on us?" Haven't they helping us keep those barbarians away so that they don't blow us in our cities? Look how successful "the war on terror" has been. And these two states, like others, have probably got some handouts from the US.
"It imperative that loyalty to a state be secured, and the nation is the means. Workers have often been asked to accept rises in interest rates, cuts in wages and services, or participation in imperialist wars, but never for the benefit of capitalism, always for the benefit of a particular nation, for “the national interest”. It is not only the state which makes such appeals. The organisations of the working class themselves reinforce reformist class consciousness within a national context. At the most elementary level this is because such organisations are unwilling to challenge the nationalism within which political discourse is conducted, for fear of being labelled unpatriotic. More importantly, however, it is because they seek either to influence or determine policy within the confines of the existing nation-state. Typically, therefore, nationalism is invested with the contradictory character of the reformist world view." The National Question, Class and the European U...