20.01.2017

From Russia with love? The end of the Obama era, the new Cold War and the globalist “Querfront”

Some media reports in Germany have purported the (recent and not-so-recent) existence of a “common front of the extreme left and the extreme right” - in German Querfront, literally “across front - that allegedly “works together” against “democracy”, the EU, “free” markets (e.g. free trade agreements such as CETA, TTIP or TPP), “liberal capitalism”, multiculturalism, feminism and LGBT rights.


They are alleging a cooperation between fascists or nationalists, who are against multiculturalism, feminism, LGBT rights and cultural globalism, on the one hand, and socialists, critical of capitalism, “corporatocracy, “free” trade, and economic globalism, on the other. Yet only because they address some similar issues and are critical of similar uncritical liberal pro-globalist propaganda doesn't mean that they are “populists” (currently the favourite buzzword to delegitimize anyone who is critical), and that they all share the same interests.

Outgoing Secretary of State Kerry with New York Times Columnist Thomas Friedman
(a self-described "radical centrist")  at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the main
globalist networking forum for business, finance, media and politics, on January 17, 2017




Yet the real 
Querfront has emerged in the “bourgeois middle” against this alleged “extremist” Querfront, at least in foreign policy and most economic policies, and it reaches from centre-left Social Democrats (e.g. those in the EU parliament) in Europe, the Democrats in the US (e.g. the Clintons) and centrist civil rights liberals ”quer” across the political spectre to centre-right economic neo-liberals (those who are currently meeting in Davos to plot the new globalist strategy); it also includes the traditionally conservative anti-communist “cold warriors”, as well as the new hawkish neo-conservatives in the tradition of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.


As the day of the inauguration of Donald Trump is upon us, the situation calls for a new global peace congress, yet tensions are set to rise in a new Cold War between three powers – the US (with its willing or (more or less) recalcitrant allies in Europe and the Middle East), Russia and China. Europe is (at least as the unity its core professes to aspires to) economically and politically shattered. And, with a few positive exceptions, the media and politics on both sides of the Atlantic are bogged in a propaganda war of mutual finger-pointing, instead of promoting a pragmatic rather than an ideological analysis. The crisis in (at least) four areas (communications, ecology, socio-economics, politics) is reminiscent of the mid- to late 1920s and early 1930s, the new, escalating confrontation between NATO, Russia and China on the other, with talk of renewed nuclear rearmament (!!), of the early 1960s. Confrontations in Eastern Europe and the South China Sea are becoming more likely, as NATO and the US are ramping up their presence there.

It has always been very convenient for conservative politicians to blame “outsiders” or “the other side” (during and ever since the Cold War), and many of them have defined themselves against it (e.g. anti-communists or il-liberals). Most recently, since the escalation between the West and Russia (and increasingly also China) within the last decade or so, alleged or actual “foreign meddling” (in Ukraine 2014, in the US presidential election 2016) has been used to legitimise and support sanctions on Russia on the one hand (more damaging for Europe than for the US, whose trade with Russia is minimal) and to distract from the endemic failure of the system they have been promoting and perpetuating, on the other. It is also supposed to distract from their own (mostly US) “meddling” (to put it mildly) into other countries' affairs, too - Argentina, Georgia, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine, Venezuela, and this is only from the past fifteen years or so, the for more details research the history of the CIA, or go to Wikileaks.



Most recently though, in a strange, almost paradoxical twist of events, these traditional anti-communist or anti-liberal warriors have been joined by their (former?) opponents on the other side, i.e. many liberals (the Querfront mentioned above). Many centre-left or centrist Clinton and Obama supporters have in recent years thrown any self-reflection overboard in their analysis of this failure, and have (in the “Russian hack” matter) even gone as far as sheepishly taking reports of shady organisations such as the CIA on face value (despite their brilliant Iraq WMD “evidence”?). No one doubts that there was some degree of Russian influence, yet by blowing it out of proportion and making it the biggest US “news” story in weeks, and going as far as ejecting Russian diplomats from the US, the White House is actually strengthening Russia's position, by giving it more PR than it deserves and by indirectly echoing the Kremlin's talking points. Vladimir Putin couldn't be happier about this, as he is the only one coming out stronger than ever before.