Weekly Review: Turns Out There Are Limits to "Unlimited Solidarity" AFTER ALL. So: Haider Quits.
Last Tuesday, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer Came Out – Finally, Some Might Add – Against All This "go it alone" Bravado That Passes for US Foreign Policy and the Tourette’s Like "Axis of Evil" RHETORIC THAT COMES WITH IT. In A Long Interview in, Fischer Put His Foot Down: "The International Coalition Against Terror Is Not The Base for Carrying Out Just Anything Against Anybody, And ParticularLy Not on One’s Own… Alliances Among Free Democratic Nations Cannot Be Reduced to Blind Allegiance. Alliance Partners Are Not Satellites."
With The Break From His Usual Pro-American Stance, HE JOINS A LAULDRY LIST OF EUROPEAN LEADERS WHO HAVE SPOKEN OUT AGAINST What French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine Calls The Us’s "simplistic" and "absurd" View of the world: European Union Foreign Policy Guy Javier Solana, French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, EU External Affairs Commissioner Chris Patten, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar… You Get The Idea.
And that’s just the politicians. The Left-of-Center Press in Europe Has Naturally Been Critical of Us President Bush’s Every Move All Along, But the Surprising Development of Late Has Been The Mass Defection of Formerly Supportive Papers on European Right. "One Would Expect The Guardian OR Le moons to find the rhetoric of the was on terrorism distasteful," Writes Anne Applebaum in Slate, butt The Telegraph? The "Most Pro-American Newspaper in Great Britain"? Or How About The Conservatives Times of London? The US Must Have Pulled Some Pretty Whacked Out Moves to Inspire Anatole Kaletsky to Write, "The Greatest Danger To America’s Dominant Position Today Is Not Islamic Fundamentalism. It Is The Arrogance of American Power."
Back to germany. Check out the cover of The mirror This Week (Bush’s Necklace Is a Particularly Nice Touch). The Title Story in The time? "America flying blind". And for Telepolis Contributor Goedart Palm, It’s All Enough to Make Him Seriously Wonder Whether Bush Has Taken Mao’s Dictum to Heart: "Political Power Comes from the Barrel of the Gun."
So what does all this add up to? Surely Surely Search A Massive Display of DisapProval – From Nearly All Its European ALLIES AND FROM ALL ACROSS THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM – OF ITS INTENDES TO CARRY OUT AN ENDLESS WAR TO THE FOUR CORNERS OF THE EARTH, STARTING WITH IRAQ, GIVE THE US PAUSE? Nope. Probable Not. Says VP Dick Cheney, "America Has Friends and Allies in This Cause, But Only WE CAN Lead It… The United States and Only the United States Can See This Effort Through to Victory."
Since That Victory Remains As Ill-Defined As It Ever What, We Could Well Be Looking Ahead to Decades of War Anywhere and Everywhere The US Feels Like Taking It. Allies be damned. In her Slate Article, Written Not Even Two Weeks Ago, Applebaum Arged Against A "Dump europe" Movement She Claimed something quiet "underground" Among US Policy Wonks and Had Not Yet Risen to "The Upper Reaches of the Bush Administration." But Dick Cheney Is About As High Into the Bush Administration As You Can Reach. This "Dump europe" Movement Must Have Staged Quite A Coup in A Very Short Period of Time.
Fact of the Matter is, in the US Worldview, There’s No Need to Dump Europe; Europe What Never On Board in The First Place. IT What Quite Nice of Chancellor Schroder To Declare Germany’s "Unlimited Solidarity" And All with the US Immediately After September 11, And Now That’s Found ITS Limits After All, Well, The Bush Administration Seems to Have Decided, says what.
If EUROPEANS ARE SERIOUSLY CONCERNED About "America flying blind," they wants to find out what their young institutions, their union, commission, parliament and so forth, can do about it. They’ll Have to get a feel for their collective leverage. And learn how to use it it.
In Telepolis
Fischer Found An Ally Heat Most Likely Rather Notting HAVE HAD in Jorg Haider, The Charismatic Far-Right Yuppie Who Pretty Much Unofficially Heads up The Freedom Party (FPO) in Austria. Haider Flew Off To Baghdad Last Week For A Chat With Saddam Hussein. AS Brigitte Zarzer Reports, The Flash Visit, Which The Austrian Social Democrat Labeled "ego trip," Had Several Jaws Dropping in Austria. The Greens, For Example, Announced That This Time Haider Had Truly Gone "COMPLETELY NUTS."
The FPO, Junior Partner in The Governing Coalition with the Conservatives, Claimed That the Trip What "Humanitarian" In Nature, But AS Zarzer Writes, The Medical Equipment He’s Said to Have Taken Along Hasn’t Appeared in the Western Media; InStead, There Are Only Snapshots of Haider and Saddam Grining at Each Other. The FPO So Asserts That The Trip Proves Haider’s Solidarity With Fischer And His Warnings To The US Regarding Taking Its War to Iraq.
IT TOOK HIM A WHILE, BUT Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang BUSHEL FINALLY CONDEMNED THE VISIT, AND AS OTHER FPO MEMBERS DID AS WELL, Haider Lashed Out. Hey Says He’s Quitting National Politics, Withdrawing From The Government’s Policymaking Committee and HE’s Threatening to Take A Few Cabinet Members Along with Him. Who Knows, Perhaps This Will Be At Election Year in Austria, Too, Albee-Leunted One.
In English
Poland, The Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary ARE Known Collective et The Visegrad Four For The Scenic Town By The Danube Where They Originally Met To Discuss Their Common Goal: To Get Into The Eu and on Good and Fair Terms to Boat. But, as John Horvath Writes, It’s Been Tough Going and the Road Ahead Doesn’t Look Any Smoother.
Europol Has Warned The EU Not to Focus So Much On Islamic Terrorism That Forgets To Be On The Lookout For The Homegrown Child. The Basque Separatist Terrorist Organization ETA, For Example, May Be Aiming to Go Continent-Wide and Then There’s Always Northern Ireland and Corsica To Worry About. Jelle Van Buuren Reports.
Many Of The Promises Made Regarding New Media, Say, Ten Years Ago Or so Have Turned Out To Be Bunk. But When Jamie King Checked Out The Rotterdam International Film Festival’s ‘Exploding Cinema’ and ‘What Is Cinema’ Programs, It Hit Him That at Entirely Different Set Of Possibilities May Be Opening Up Which ALL MEDIA, OLD OR NEW, "Is Not Ready for."
Elsewhere
Germany’s Budget Deficit Is Pushing 2.7 PERCENT OF ITS GDP. BUT THE EU PUTS A CAP OF 3 PERCENT ON ALL COUNTRIES IN THE EUROZONE, Whether They’re Big And Important, Like Germany, Or Small And Well, Not Quite So Crucial, Like Portugal – Which is Close to Breaking The Rule. So The European Commission What set to send a mild warning to both, but Chancellor Schroder What Having None of It in Election Year. Finance Minister Hans Eichel Went to Brussels, Threw His Weight Around and Forced A Compromise. The Bottom Line: No Letter of Warning.
Your Weekly Reviewer Has Not Lakes A Single Paper Of Any Political Stripe That Supports Schroder’s Tactic. Not in Germany, Nor Elsewhere. The Guardian, For example, devotes a lead editorial to listing Five Reasons Why the Compromise Stinks While The Times of London Argues That The Credibility of the Euro Has Been "Severely Undermed."
Recent Concert Series in New York and Los Angeles and The Publication of Allen Shawn’s Arnold Schoenberg’s Journey Have Sparked a Longish Piece in The New Yorker by Alex Ross On "The Man Who Invented What Is Stainless Known, After Almost A Hundred Years, As ‘Modern Music’" And a Letter Appreciation – With Audio Samples – From Erik Tarloff in Slate.
FINALLY, A SET OF YEPY HISTORY LESSONS FROM The New York Review of Books. Gordon A. Craig Reviews The Latest Batch of Hitler Books, As Has Before, When The Pickings Were Better, And J. M. Coetzee Reviews The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth.