by Oui
Tue Feb 11th, 2025 at 06:04:46 PM EST
Frank's Story Index | 20 Nov. 2018 | [Updated into 2019]
The 585 articles I have posted on the European Tribune since Wed Nov 28th. 2007 are grouped somewhat arbitrarily under the 13 headings below with the latest listed first.
Make Europe Great Again (MEGA) ...
not if Trump-Musk demon duo can help it.
Soon Europe too will go head-to-head with the bullying of the New World and its strangulating economic sanctions, trade tariffs and Hollywood fake culture.
Make Europe Great Again (MEGA)
I used to write quite a lot about US politics - about 65 stories on the European Tribune alone. And then Trump got elected and I could face it no longer. Say what you like about the legitimacy of his election, but the very fact that a guy like that could get elected doesn't fill me with much hope for the USA as an advanced polity. And why write about him when so many there are much more qualified to do so?
I came of age politically through meeting some South African anti-Apartheid activists who inspired me to do my masters thesis on Apartheid. I couldn't bring myself to visit their country until Mandela was freed and elected President. I did not want to become complicit in the Apartheid regime by visiting the country while I would still enjoy the privileges of a white European under Apartheid. I feel almost as bad about visiting the USA now: lots of great people, but the system absolutely sucks.
And now, having written 170 stories on Brexit, I am beginning to wonder whether my interest in writing about the UK will survive a Boris Johnson victory in this weeks general election. Any country which could vote for Boris Johnson as its leader has to be seriously f*cked up... And yet all you hear and read in the media commentary about the election is of self-proclaimed former Labour voters deciding to vote for Boris because they can't stand Corbyn.
What is it they can't stand about Corbyn when he has been (a relative) voice for moderation and reason in an increasingly dysfunctional, corrupt and disintegrating political system?
[...]
Interesting Frank ... South Africa Apartheid and White Supremacy are teaming up to come after you ... signed Elon Musk ... frustrated in his youth living in
How the roots of the `PayPal mafia' extend to apartheid South Africa | The Guardian - 26 Jan. 2025 |
Musk is part of the "PayPal mafia" of libertarian billionaires with roots in South Africa under white rule now hugely influential in the US tech industry and politics.
They include Peter Thiel, the German-born billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal cofounder, who was educated in a southern African city in the 1970s where Hitler was still openly venerated.
Thiel, a major donor to Trump's campaign, has been critical of welfare programs and women being permitted to vote as undermining capitalism. A 2021 biography of Thiel, called The Contrarian, alleged that as a student at Stanford he defended apartheid as "economically sound".
David Sacks, formerly PayPal's chief operating officer and now a leading fundraiser for Trump, was born in Cape Town and grew up within the South African diaspora after his family moved to the US when he was young. A fourth member of the mafia, Roelof Botha, the grandson of the apartheid regime's last foreign minister, Pik Botha, and former PayPal CFO, has kept a lower political profile but remains close to Musk.
Groundwork has been prepared during past decades ever since the Joseph McCarthy - Barry Goldwater era. 😡
From Twitter to X: one year on, are white supremacists back? | The Conversation |
On 28 October 2022, just one day after acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk published a message that summed up his vision for its future: "The bird is free".
The social network's emblematic blue colour quickly gave way to the black X - reminiscent of the dark web - when Musk's X Corp, took control. Soon after, the billionaire announced the restoration of 62,000 previously suspended accounts, including - and this was to make headlines - that of Donald Trump.
The technology mogul clearly stated his intention: to transform Twitter into a platform where freedom of speech would approach the absolute.
The persistent suspension of white nationalist leaders
X carried out an initial wave of restorations of suspended accounts from November 2022, including white-nationalist leaders suspended from 2017 to 2021. The waves of "deplatforming" started after the Charlottesville "United the Right" rally that turned deadly and continued through the assault on the U.S. Capitol.
During that period, the accounts of well-known figures such as Ku Klux Klan icon David Duke were suspended. The measure also affected less high-profile but equally important individuals, such as Jared Taylor, founder of the white supremacist website American Renaissance and Greg Johnson, publisher of the white nationalist magazine Counter-Currents.
This quote from Elon Musk says it all in a nutshell ...
"My trans-daughter is a Communist."
Jeremy Corbyn? Had to be destroyed because he is a Communist ... no holds barred. The “anti-Semitic” smear performed miracles 🤬
The twin fascist states the U.S. and the Jewish State of Israel .. divide and conquer.
The following headlines should be interpreted as ...
White Supremacist Hate Speech (KKK) vs European Social-Democratic Neo Enlightenment
Battling pure evil ... time for Europe to be woke 😤
American Free Speech vs. European Censorship | Gatestone Institute |
Elon Musk has never made a secret of his adherence to the American concept of freedom of expression, which is that expression is free regardless of what the law says.
By contrast, according to the European Convention on Human Rights, expression is free with legal exceptions. For a long time, these exceptions were rare, with the result that expression remained almost as free in Europe as in the United States. Over the past 30 years, however these European exceptions to free expression have multiplied -- hate, discrimination, racism, Islamophobia, transphobia, and so on -- to the extent that European citizens - including those in the UK - are now being arrested, tried and imprisoned for expressing inappropriate ideas on Facebook, X/Twitter and other social media platforms.
But then, you might ask, why can't the two concepts of expression -- free in the USA, censored in Europe -- coexist, each in its own way, on our respective continents?
The problem is that the European Union has an imperialist conception of its regulation. The EU does not regulate Europe; it seems to think it regulates the world. True to the rich German and French legal traditions, the EU sees itself as a kind of legislative model for the planet. Not only is the EU taking the initiative to regulate sectors that were not regulated before, it also seems to expect the rest of the world to follow suit.
Better -- or worse, depending on your point of view -- the EU is backing up its global regulations with sanctions no less global. Apple was recently hit with a landmark $2 billion EU antitrust fine.
Breaches of the Digital Services Act (DSA) are punishable by penalties calculated as a percentage of revenues -- not profits -- received by the company concerned not just in Europe, but all over the world. In the case of companies such as Meta (Facebook) or X, we are talking about EU fines running into billions of dollars. Since they seem not to be able to innovate -- anyhow, they haven't -- they tax Americans, who have.
All the "major platforms" that the European Union is regulating with imperial superciliousness are in fact American. Therefore, none of these platforms is subject to the august EU. As technology expert Jason Oxman remarks, "the EU [has] become as sterile in innovation as it is fertile in regulation."
This puts the EU and its DSA on a collision course with the incoming Trump administration. With touching naivety, the German media on January 8, 2025, greedily called for DSA sanctions to be applied to X and to Meta (Facebook).
Gatestone Institute with one of their heroes ... Geert Wilders
Jewish billionaire Rosenwald funding the AfD fascists in Germany .. who/what the hell is undermining democracy and sovereignty in Europe?
Factsheet: Gatestone Institute | BR---DGE |
Nina Rosenwald is the heiress to the Sears Roebuck fortune. A 2011 report [FEAR Inc.] by the Center for American Progress found that since 2001, Rosenwald, through her family foundation, the William Rosenwald Family Fund, donated more than $2.8 million to "organizations that fan the flames of Islamophobia." The Center for American Progress identified the family fund as one of the the top seven funders of Islamophobia.
A September 2017 article in The Intercept by investigative journalist Lee Fang found that Gatestone published articles "focused on stoking fears about immigrants and Muslims." In another article from 2018, Fang noted Gatestone was "infamous for its role in publishing "fake news" and spreading hate about Muslims." Fang also found that Gatestone's anti-Muslim content had been regularly promoted by politicians, including members and affiliated online groups, of the far-right German party, Alternative for Germany (AfD).
Guido Lombardi tweets a story from a bizarre, conspiracy-laden, anti-Semitic blog, Political Vel Craft: Veil of Politics, which attacks France's President-elect, Emmanuel Macron, as a plant of the Rothschild banking family in the Elysee Palace (Obama too was one in the White House!) and a closeted gay. It accuses him of forming a Hitler Jugend-like Youths for Macron campaign support group.
Guido Lombardi is the American president-elect's neighbor, a Facebook organizer and his self-professed contact to Europe's far-right parties
Are you an ambitious European pol seeking an audience with Donald Trump?Then George "Guido" Lombardi may just be your man -- although there are no guarantees.
The Italian businessman is the president-elect's downstairs neighbor at Trump Tower -- he occupies the 62nd and 63rd floors. In Trump's words, the two have been "friends for a long time." To listen to Lombardi tell it, he is the president-elect's closest European confidante besides Nigel Farage, and the man who set up Trump's online guerilla operation.
Marine LePen meeting with Guido Lombardi at Trump Tower
U.S. Charities Funneled More Than $105 Million to Anti-Muslim Groups, New Report Finds | TIME - 13 Jan 2022 |
Elon Musk remarks free Tommy Robinson
Tommy Robinson supporters hail Elon Musk before invading anti-fascist counter-demo
Protester Craig, from London, held up a T-shirt thanking tech billionaire Elon Musk for his support of Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, this month. "Elon Musk has showed assistance verbally and hopefully financially. We love Elon Musk and we love the Donald [Trump] too," he told The National.
In my search, the study of peace has all but been eliminated ... this single piece stood out ...
American empire and forever wars is the "New World Order"
Before the democratic peace: Racial utopianism, empire and the abolition of war | by Duncan Bell - Dec 2020 |
During the final quarter of the 20th century, the democratic peace thesis -- the idea that democracies do not fight each other -- moved to the centre of scholarly debate throughout the Western world. Much of this work traces its origins to the European Enlightenment, focusing especially on Immanuel Kant.
Yet this narrative ignores earlier 20th-century debates about the possibilities of global peace, and the role of democracy within them. In this article, I analyse some prominent, but now largely forgotten, strands of political thinking in the United States and Britain during the first half of the 20th century. They form an important part of the genealogy of the democratic peace thesis. I start by delineating four types of argument about peace that were popular in the 19th century: liberal-systemic, radical-liberal, socialist and republican.
I then introduce two other modes of argument that circulated at the turn of the 20th century: the `democratic war thesis' (the idea that democracies are war-prone) and the `empire peace thesis' (the argument that only imperial states are capable of assuring perpetual peace). I follow this with a discussion of racial utopianism -- the claim that the unification of the Anglo-Saxons could eliminate war, securing peace and justice on earth. This white supremacist vision was a call for the racial pacification of the globe.
From his book:
Book review: Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America
I cannot find any inspiration from this abstract or thinking ... Anglo-Saxons and "Peace" are two contradictory terms. Seems like a call for white supremacy and apartheid. Destroying the link between Europe and Russia is an exponent of "Anglo-Saxon war thesis" ... a Revolution in process as citizens are standing by, watching these lunatics in office. The fascist remarks by Borrell was another moment of deprivation.
EU Commission ...
Looking at Trump, Europe's far right vows to ’reconquer' the continent
"Our friend Trump, the Trump tornado, has changed the world in just a couple of weeks," Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán tells far-right rally in Madrid.
Wise up Europe ‼️
Macron: Paradise Cannot Mean the Wild West
See also speech by co-host Modi of India.
US puts Europe, China on notice over excessive AI regulation | TRT World |
Dozens of nations sign a statement in Paris, calling for efforts to flank AI technology with regulation to make it "open" and "ethical", but the United States and Britain opt out.
US Vice President JD Vance has warned European allies against over-regulating the US-dominated artificial intelligence sector and China against using the technology to tighten its grip on power.
The confrontational remarks on Tuesday by Donald Trump's deputy to world leaders gathered in Paris to discuss AI punctured the unity that hosts France had hoped to project for the two-day meeting.
Dozens of nations signed a statement calling for efforts to flank the technology with regulation to make it "open" and "ethical". But the communique was not signed by the United States or Britain, which is no longer an EU member.
"Excessive regulation... could kill a transformative sector just as it's taking off," Vance told global leaders and tech industry chiefs at the French capital's Grand Palais, calling on Europe to show "optimism rather than trepidation".
India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi had minutes earlier called for "collective, global efforts to establish governance and standards that uphold our shared values, address risks and build trust".
Modi co-hosted the summit with France's President Emmanuel Macron and his country will host the next meeting on advancing global rules.
Keir Starmer in role Neville Chamberlain … bows to dictator Trump.
Keir Starmer is in a tight spot, but a ’Trump, baby, Trump’ strategy just won’t work | The Guardian Opinion |
It’s fun that Keir Starmer has finally unveiled a personality – it’s just a shame it’s the radio edit of someone else’s. I’m sure you can guess whose.
Announcing plans to make it easier to build nuclear power stations last week, the prime minister was willingly drawn into some kind of call and response answer to a BBC question, fixing one eye on the cameras and gibbering: “I say: build, baby, build.”Yowch. Hope he sees this, king!
On the other hand, this delivery slightly reminded me of Daniel Craig’s accent in Knives Out, of which one co-star opined: “I remember the first time he did that on set, there was kind of a moment of silence after he finished and just a smile on everyone’s face.” Mm. Likewise.
[…]
As I say, having witnessed this before, we might have expected the prime minister’s next symptoms to be talking in a supercool way about “freeways” and “seltzer”, and saying “I could care less” when he meant he couldn’t. But no.
Instead, Starmer opted on Monday to release photos and footage of illegal migrants being escorted on to planes to be deported – just like the Trump administration did last week, would you believe. The White House version had far more of an eye on iconic image, of course, with a line of deportees stretching back from the maw of a military plane, while Starmer and the Home Office preferred to cast their montage as the “journey” of an illegal migrant, a phrase so reality-TV-esque that I half expected to find the PM standing at the plane steps with an iPad and the catchphrase “before you go, let’s have a look at your best bits”.
Trump has been in office for precisely 23 days, while Starmer seemingly spent about 23 years being the prime minister in waiting, repeatedly indicating to the British public that he had a huge number of ideas. A lot of these currently seem to have been boiled down to offering a bowdlerised, PG take on Trump’s R-rated blockbuster. Does anyone want to see that?
Contrary to relations with socialist Trudeau …
Trudeau tells business leaders at economic summit Trump’s 51st state threat ’is a real thing’
