by Oui
Thu Apr 16th, 2020 at 11:31:28 AM EST
Missing solidarity or European Social-Democracy, the counterrevolution from the progressive Seventies to Conservatism and Pure Capitalism starting in the Reagan era. Beyond competition, earning decent wages and a basic right of healthcare, what the coronavirus pandemic lays bare is an open wound of a destitute America and many countries across the globe.
Washington DC was historically taught as being that shining city on the hill ... a close-up proves it to be quarrelling institutional powers dividing a great nation, not uniting peoples.
No one could EVER illustrate such division as a narcissistic president like Donald Trump. Every press briefing is an affront to what AMERICA STANDS FOR! It's just HORRIFIC that there are still so many followers from the hard working class to university educated persons following the populist policy of everyone for personal gain, others can literally die!
Masses of households living from pay check to pay check, falling ill or without medicine are in the waiting room of death. That was the America I saw as a 16-year old, the discrepancy and inequality has risen through Republican "leadership" to a alarming level. It's out there for everyone to see ... through social media and slowly through reports by journalists. It's more than dramatic ... it's like the horror of a New Civil War ... the worst of all wars!
More below the fold ...
As a 16-year old I mowed the lawn of a sweet elderly couple living in a suburb just beyond the Monsanto Plant in Creve Coeur Mo., the Show-Me State. His whole life was spend with livestock on a meat farm. His life savings took a hit once he and his wife were retired. I was asked to drive them in their Cadillac to the Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis. A journey I'll always remember. We spend the first night in a hotel in Hannibal, so my dreams that night were vividly about the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
What is the AngloSaxon model that is class based with disregard for the less fortunate? As I had my education in science, the exact analysis and research, the last few decades I had to add knowledge from the Alpha side such as psychology and history. I'm still at it, doing my best.
Brexit is about trade, not people ...
○ A Truly Special Relationship: The Time Is Now for a U.S.-UK Free Trade Agreement | The Heritage Foundation |
Reassessing the Special Relationship | JSTOR - 2009 |
The resignation of Tony Blair as British Prime Minister and the transition from Bush to Obama in the US mark the end of the second revival of the US-UK special relationship. The classic era of the special relationship began under the Labour government in the 1940s, though it was Winston Churchill who inspired the concept. It ended with the resignation of Harold Macmillan in 1963. Margaret Thatcher revived close personal relations with the US President as a guiding principle of UK foreign policy and Tony Blair successfully revived them again, even though the end of the Cold War had transformed the framework of transatlantic relations.
Over the past 60 years US-UK relations have embedded specific security arrangements which have persisted, largely unquestioned, through the ups and downs of political relations at the top: close links between the two countries' armed forces; access to defence technology and procurement; intelligence ties through the UKUSA Agreement; a semi-independent nuclear deterrent and provision of military bases in the UK and its overseas territories. Public debate on the costs and benefits of these links has been limited; successive governments have discouraged a wider debate.
The Obama administration enters office with few of the personal ties to Britain and to English culture, which have underpinned the special relationship. Earlier US administrations have approached relations with the UK from the perspective of US interests, while many British political leaders have felt--and have hoped to find in Washington--a sentimental attachment to Anglo-American partnership. British foreign policy would benefit from a reassessment of the structures of US-UK relations in terms of British interests, costs and benefits.
History ...
○ Not a Ragged Mob; The Inauguration of 1829
A turn for the better under President Trump ... the bust of Winston Churchill was returned to a prominent place in the White House.
The UK political leaders never were all in it for a bond with the European Union ... military and intelligence forbade any such move away from America. Raw politics at the most senior levels of government will prevent Social Democracy on human rights, foreign policy and basic workers rights including non-discriminatory on age-religion-gender. A deal under Brexit will just not come to pass.
The Special Relationship: The Reality behind the Myth
The Prime Minister has just returned from his first meeting with President George W. Bush at Camp David and proclaimed "I am an Atlanticist".
The special relationship on the international political front works and is no small part dependent upon the close personal relationships which have been forged between British Prime Ministers and American Presidents. Such relationships are most important in times of war as Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt combination showed. They are of great significance as well in times of peace and even in peace time wars continue. In more recent times Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan became the best political friends. America provided valuable military intelligence to Britain during the Falklands war. Britain made a substantial military contribution to the war against Iraqi's Saddam Hussein. Tony Blair and Bill Clinton became close personal friends, and the Prime Minister went out of his way to support Bill Clinton when he faced impeachment proceedings. Messrs. Blair and Bush recently initiated an Anglo-American aerial bombing raid in a further effort enforce the no fly zone and to subdue Saddam Hussein.
Although there have been cut backs for budgetary reasons in recent years the United States still maintains a big military presence and air bases in the United Kingdom. There are few countries where the United States has not had difficulties because of local political pressure in maintaining a significant military presence. The worst that America has endured here in recent years with regard to its British military presence are the anti-nuclear protesters at Greenham Common.
The "Special Relationship" exists because at the highest political levels the chief executives of both countries have built and maintained a good personal relationship and such relationship has been anchored in a critical military co-operation.
The Anglo-American relationship is also based on a shared history, shared culture and a shared common language notwithstanding the famous Shavian comment about "two nations divided by a common language". It is also no small part based on shared legal norms.
Rewriting history ...
The Other War:
FDR's Battle Against Churchill and the British Empire
On May 10, 1982, Henry A. Kissinger mounted the podium at Chatham House, the London home of the Royal Institute for International Affairs, to deliver the keynote address for the bicentenary celebration of the Office of the British Foreign Secretary. Kissinger boasted of his loyalty to the British Foreign Office on all crucial matters of postwar policy matters in dispute between the United States and Britain. The crux of his disagreement with his own nominal country, the United States, he told his audience, was the basic dispute in policy and philosophy between ``Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, reflecting our different histories.'' Roosevelt, Kissinger stated, had condemned Churchill as being ``needlessly obsessed with power politics, too rigidly anti-Soviet, too colonialist in his attitude to what is now called the Third World, and too little interested in building the fundamentally new international order towards which American idealism had always tended.''
It is Churchill who was right, and Roosevelt, who was wrong, in these matters, said Kissinger.
While the majority of Kissinger's elite audience was keenly aware of the bitter dispute between Roosevelt and Churchill, a different history has been made available to the average American: a mass of lies and half-truths about a so-called ``special relationship'' between Britain and the United States, based on common ideals, supposedly supported by both Churchill and Roosevelt, and intended to last into the next millennium. This rewriting of history began almost immediately with FDR's untimely death in April 1945, and has continued to this day.
Thus, what was perhaps the defining battle that shaped the course of current history remains unknown to most Americans. It is important that this story now truthfully be told, especially as a young American President has taken the steps to walk away from Britain and the "special relationship.''
The historical evidence shows that Roosevelt entered into the military alliance with Britain with only one purpose in mind: the defeat of an enemy. The historical evidence also shows that Franklin Roosevelt was committed to dismantling the British Empire--and all other empires--and to replacing them with sovereign nation-states, modelled on the American constitutional republic, in which each citizen would be given, through access to modern scientific education and Western culture, the opportunity to create a better life for himself and his posterity.
It is this view of man, in the tradition of Western Judeo-Christian civilization, that places a value in each sovereign human individual, that the oligarch Churchill bitterly opposed, and that President Franklin D. Roosevelt espoused.
In 1946, as the history of the period was already being rewritten, FDR's son, Elliot, published a short book, titled As He Saw It. With pungency and force, using first-hand accounts, Elliot told the truth about his father's bitter fights with Churchill, leading the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. to state in a contemporary review that the book's central thesis was that Roosevelt saw Great Britain and its imperial system as a far greater adversary to the United States than Russia.
○ American Visions of Europe: Franklin D. Roosevelt, George F. Kennan, and Dean G. Acheson
Declaration of 9th may 1950 Delivered by Robert Schuman
In 1950, the nations of Europe were still struggling to overcome the devastation wrought by World War II, which had ended 5 years earlier.
Determined to prevent another such terrible war, European governments concluded that pooling coal and steel production would - in the words of the Declaration - make war between historic rivals France and Germany "not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible".
It was thought - correctly - that merging of economic interests would help raise standards of living and be the first step towards a more united Europe.
"World peace cannot be safeguarded without the ma-king of creative efforts proportionate to the dangers which threaten it.
The contribution which an organised and living Europe can bring to civilisation is indispensable to the maintenance of peaceful relations. in taking upon herself for more than 20 years the role of champion of a united Europe, France has always had as her essential aim the service of peace. A United Europe was not achieved and we had war.
Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan. it will be built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity. the coming together of the nations of Europe requires the elimination of the age-old opposition of France and Ger-many. any action taken must in the first place concern these two countries.
With this aim in view, the French Government proposes that action be taken immediately on one limited but decisive point :
It proposes that Franco-German production of coal and steel as a whole be placed under a common high authority, within the framework of an organisation open to the participation of the other countries of Europe.
[...]
The solidarity in production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible. The setting up of this powerful productive unit, open to all countries willing to take part and bound ultimately to provide all the member countries with the basic elements of industrial production on the same terms, will lay a true foundation for their economic unification."
Europe and America: The End of the Transatlantic Relationship?
"America First" is "America Alone"
Foreign policy is like physics: vacuums quickly fill. As the United States retreats from the international order it helped put in place and maintain since the end of World War II, Russia is rapidly filling the vacuum. Federiga Bindi's new book assesses the consequences of this retreat for transatlantic relations and Europe, showing how the current path of US foreign policy is leading to isolation and a sharp decrease of US influence in international relations.
Transatlantic relations reached a peak under President Barack Obama. But under the Trump administration, withdrawal from the global stage has caused irreparable damage to the transatlantic partnership and has propelled Europeans to act more independently. Europe and America explores this tumultuous path by examining the foreign policy of the United States, Russia, and the major European Union member states. The book highlights the consequences of US retreat for transatlantic relations and Europe, demonstrating that "America first" is becoming "America alone," perhaps marking the end of transatlantic relations as we know it, with Europe no longer beholden to the US national interest.
○ Europe's Four Freedoms
○ East-West Schism: Destruction Process Inside Europe
It's not about Britain, Soviet Union, China or the Unted States today!
The Global Order and the Survival of Plane Earth is at stake:
AT A NEW CROSSROAD IN 2020
