Chorus of the Poodles
by Thomas Harrington at Brownstone Institute
It would be very difficult to find a more Europe-loving American than me. For more than four decades, I have studied Europe’s cultures, Europe’s languages, and Europe’s national and transnational histories. Any critical capacity I might have is derived in large part from my readings of the Old Continent’s thinkers, as well as many face-to-face dialogues with good European friends. I am sure that without this intense involvement with Europe’s cultures, the quality of both my personal life and my intellectual abilities would be different…and markedly inferior to what they presently are.
It was thanks, above all, to the effervescence of the culture of criticism in Spain and so many other countries on the European continent in the last decades of the 20th century and the first five years of the 21st century that I was able to recognize my country of birth for what it is, at least in part: a ruthless empire trapped in a vicious circle of wars and secret operations that systematically violate the basic rights of the people of other countries, and that only serve to impoverish and brutalize the lives of the vast majority of my fellow citizens and me.
And it is thanks to these same lessons learned from European culture that I feel the need to say to my friends there that the current intellectual and political elites of the EU have completely lost track of the reality of their relationship with their great American friend.
It is sad to say but the intellectual and social offspring of the European elites who provided me with the keys to understanding the mechanics of the propaganda machine under which I lived as a citizen of the North American empire have completely failed to detect the interference of that same machine in their own lives when, during the first decade of this century, their “friends” in Washington decided to apply its techniques of coercive persuasion to them with a new level of technological sophistication and ruthlessness.
The fact that Washington used propaganda to foster positive attitudes in Europe toward North American culture, and by extension, its imperialist goals, was no secret among the well-read people of the Continent in the last decades of the 20th century. Nor was it a secret—among a much smaller group of European intellectual elites—that the US secret services, working with fascist elements that they had created and/or protected by (e.g. the Gladio “stay-at-home” armies), used false flag attacks again and again (the attack on the Bologna railway station in 1980 being the best known of them) to pursue their political and strategic ends.
But with the end of the Cold War, the awareness among the thinking classes of Europe regarding the not exactly fraternal and loyal nature of the great American friend quickly disappeared. And what began as a sudden bout of amnesia turned in time into a posture of childish credulity in the face of almost all the “talking points” emanating from the great centers of military, diplomatic, and intelligence power in Washington.
It would be comforting to see all this as a spontaneous change of attitude among the ruling classes of the EU, derived, for example, from the creation of the euro or the apparent prosperity generated by the rapid creation of the single market.
But explaining it in this way goes against what we have been taught by great scholars of the dynamics of large-scale cultural production such as Benedict Anderson, Pierre Bourdieu, and Itamar Even-Zohar who maintain, each in their own way, that contrary to so much of what is said about the great ability of the popular masses to alter the course of history, most truly significant cultural change almost always comes from coordinated campaigns initiated in the highest political and cultural spheres of society.
Put another way, there is no culture without standards of quality. There is only random information. And there are no canons of quality without the conscientious action of people or groups of people invested with the social authority to enshrine a particular semiotic element as “good” at the expense of several others. Similarly, one cannot talk about agriculture without the presence of a farmer capable of distinguishing between “useful” plants and those that are usually classified as weeds.
Neither the cultural authorities and producers, nor the officials of the great centers of political and economic power who directly or indirectly pay their salaries, tend to announce to the general public the enormous role that all of them play in the creation and maintenance of what we usually call social “reality.” And that is for a simple reason. It is not in their interest to do so.
Rather, it is in their interest that consumers of cultural products arising from their conscious acts of curation understand the process of their appearance in the public sphere as either the result of the singular effort of the person presented in public as their “author,” or of essentially mysterious and inscrutable larger “market” forces.
But just because the elites set things up this way does not mean that we cannot, with a little extra effort, come to understand with a considerable level of accuracy how major cultural and political changes of the type that Europe has witnessed in recent years have come about.
The first key, as I suggested above, is to be suspicious of the ostensibly organic nature of abrupt changes in ways of viewing or dealing with issues (e.g. sexual identities, immigration, treating respiratory diseases with very low mortality rates, the problem of living in an information-rich society, etc.) that have been managed in a generally smooth and successful manner for many years before the present moment.
The second is to ask, “What powerful interest groups might benefit from the radical new approach to these issues or problems?”
The third is to investigate possible links between the centers of political and economic power and the media centers that are promoting the radically different ways of dealing with the problem. And once these links are revealed, it is important to carefully study the histories of the protagonists in question, cataloging their various affiliations with key centers of power, and—this is very important—tracing their public, and better yet, semi-public and private, statements on the issue or issues in question.
Perhaps out of simple arrogance or an overconfidence in the ability of the media they generally control to keep their most precious secrets from being revealed to the public, people in power give themselves away with surprising frequency. It is very important to be willing to hear and catalogue these “slips” when they occur.
The fourth is to learn to ignore official explanations (aka “what all ‘smart’ people know”) about the phenomenon in question.
When we take such an approach to transatlantic relations over the past three decades, nothing, absolutely nothing, of what happened in Europe in the days after JD Vance’s speech in Munich should surprise us.
Before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the primacy of the US in transatlantic relations, as demonstrated by its interference in European internal affairs through devices such as the aforementioned Gladio “stay behind armies,” was unquestionable.
But the fall of so-called real socialism and the subsequent rise of the EU and the single currency raised the hope among many, including the author of these lines, that Europe could become a new pole of geo-strategic power capable of competing with both the United States and China, a vision that assumed the continued availability of the reasonably priced natural resources housed under Russian soil.
For the elites of the United States, however, this new European dream was the stuff of nightmares. They understood that the effective union of the economies of the EU and Russia could result in the creation of a Leviathan capable of seriously threatening American geopolitical supremacy in a relatively short space of time.
The solution?
The same one that has been used by all empires eager to maintain their power against potential rivals: divide and rule.
The first person to sound the alarm was the former head of national security during the Jimmy Carter administration, Zbigniew Brzezinski. He did so in his The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1998). In this text, Brzezinski speaks openly of the need to dismantle the remnants of the Soviet Union even more fully than had been the case until then, making clear that the key to catalyzing this process would be the absorption of Ukraine into NATO and the EU.
While it is true that he speaks in the same book of a desire to maintain peaceful relations with Russia, he underscores that maintaining such a state of peace depended entirely on Russia’s acceptance of its permanently subordinate status before the combined economic and military power of the United States, and an EU and a NATO under effective US domination. Or, as he succinctly summed things up, “the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.”
So, while American politicians and their strategists like Brzezinski were publicly praising the strong and unbreakable nature of transatlantic relations, they were working on another level to seriously weaken Europe’s real power within that diplomatic coupling. The first attack, which most Europeans, imitating the well-known tendency of abused children to not admit the damage they have suffered at the hands of their parents, was the total indifference with which US leaders treated the millions of European citizens and a very considerable part of their political class that were vehemently against the invasion and destruction of Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.
It was followed by the transparent attempts of the US Secretary of Defense and chief architect of that premeditated exercise in patriacide, Donald Rumsfeld, to play off what he called the “New Europe,” composed of the ex-communist countries of the East who, willing for a series of understandable historical reasons to blindly follow the American geopolitical guidelines, with the more recalcitrant powers of what he called “Old Europe,” led by France, Germany and Italy.
To these latter countries he said in the oh-so-affectionate language of oh-so-dear friends more or less this: “If you do not do what we want you to do in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places, we will transfer much of the financial, diplomatic and military aid that we now give you to your more grateful cousins in places like Poland, Romania, Lithuania and Estonia.”
What was the reaction of Old Europe to this blackmail? The more or less total acceptance of the demands for diplomatic and financial military cooperation issued by the American master.
And with this capitulation in hand, the US strategic leadership set in motion the next chapter of its campaign to clip the wings of the EU: the effective capture of its media system.
Upon becoming Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld spoke time and again of effecting a strategic revolution in the US military under the doctrine of Full Spectrum Dominance, a philosophy that places enormous emphasis on the management of information in the various spaces where the US finds itself with significant clash of interests.
The doctrine is based on the idea that in today’s conflicts, the management of information is as important, if not more so, than the amount of lethal force that each of the opposing factions has at their disposal. The key, according to the authors of this doctrine, is the ability to flood the enemy camp with a massive and constant flow of varied and sometimes contradictory information to induce disorientation and confusion in their ranks, and from there, the desire to surrender hastily to the demands of their rival.
In a slip of the sort described above, a person widely believed to be Karl Rove, Bush Jr.’s so-called brain, described, in a 2004 interview with journalist Ron Suskind, how this new doctrine actually functions in the arena of conflict.
When the latter spoke to him about the need for journalists to discern the truth through empirical methods, he replied: “That’s not the way the world really works anymore…We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
In Europe, this soon resulted in a massive rise in the number of pro-Atlanticist voices into the continent’s “quality” media outlets, a trend that only became more acute after the 2008 crisis, when the traditional model of journalism, which had already been seriously weakened by the sudden emergence of the Internet a decade earlier, was definitively broken.
In order to survive as institutions, these media companies had to seek financial support wherever they could find it. And they often obtained it from large international investment funds closely linked to the US, and—as we have been able to definitively confirm in recent weeks—also from US government bodies, such as USAID, that are closely linked to the intelligence services of US agencies which, in turn, distributed them to the European media through a multitude of NGOs characterized by an ostensible concern with things like “freedom of expression” and the “quality of democratic processes.”
In the case of Spain, this transformation was clearly seen in the ideological evolution of El País in the years after 2008, with its most emblematic changes being the forced resignation of Maruja Torres, a woman with strong pro-Palestinian, pro-Arab, and anti-imperialist convictions in 2013, and the elevation to director of the newspaper (against the wishes of the majority of the editorial staff) in 2014 of Antonio Caño.
Anyone who had taken the time to read the reports sent to Spain by Caño from Washington, where he was a correspondent for the paper in the 10 years prior to his appointment as editor-in-chief of the paper—in which he basically translated into Spanish the reports published the day before in the government-supervised New York Times and the Washington Post—would have instantly understood the magnitude of the change in direction at the paper.
From that moment on, basically no systematic or radical criticism of the foreign or domestic policy of the United States was published in its pages. This, while the paper was dramatically increasing its coverage of American culture at the expense of Spanish and/or European matters. This is when we began to see the now common but still absurd practice of providing El País’s readers with coverage of everyday US events such as heavy snowfalls in New York, which have no real relevance to the daily life of anyone living in the Iberian peninsula.
And given its position as a leader within the Spanish journalistic sector, a position earned thanks to its valuable work during the first decades of the post-Franco democracy (1975-2005), the country’s other newspapers and media outlets began (with the probable “help” of USAID and its extensive network of NGOs) to adopt very similar pro-American positions.
The effect, to paraphrase Karl Rove, was to create an entirely new Spanish and European social “reality,” in which, in stark contrast to the journalistic culture of this these same cultural spaces in the last two or three decades of the last century, almost everything worth knowing and imitating came from the United States, and where those who might think that things like NATO and its wars, nihilistic consumerism, militaristic Zionism, friendly relations with Russia, and the unbridled and uncritical embrace of sexual identity were objectionable, were portrayed as ill-informed troglodytes.
Does this seem like too much speculation on my part? Well, consider the case of German journalist Udo Ulfkotte, who, ill and suffering from a guilty conscience, revealed in a 2014 interview and book that he had accepted money, trips, and various other favors from US and German intelligence services for writing pro-American and anti-Russian articles in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), the prestigious German newspaper where he worked. And he made it clear in that interview that the practice was common in all the major EU newsrooms.
The strange fate of his book on the subject, Gekaufte Journalisten. Wie Politiker, Geheimdienste und Hochfinanz Deutschlands Massenmedien lenken, which came out in 2014, along with the tone of the Wikipedia-type posts about the author that exist today on the internet – crudely and comically defamatory – constitute a covert confirmation of the veracity of his accusations.
After seeing the interview cited above in which he talked about his book, I, since I do not read German, vigorously searched for a translation of the text in one of the languages I do read. I found several reports saying that it would be translated into English and Italian quite soon. But years passed, and none of the promised translations materialized. Finally, in the summer of 2017, an English version of the text appeared in a listing on Amazon.
The only problem was that it was priced at $1,309.09! But in the same listing, it said that no more copies were available! The English version of the text finally came out in October 2019, more than five long years after the author’s explosive accusations and more than two years after his death in January 2017 at the age of 56. Very convenient from the point of view of the secret services, isn’t it?
And let’s not forget that, at the end of 2013, just before Ulfkotte’s first public confessions, it was revealed that the NSA had already been reading all the contents of the personal phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel for 11 years. And that happened just a few months after Edward Snowden revealed that the United States was monitoring not only all communications of almost all legislative, administrative, and diplomatic bodies of the European Union but was also spying on the internal communications of several of the most powerful companies in the continental economy.
Don’t you remember the furious reaction of Frau Merkel, of the MEPs and of the commentators of all the major newspapers on the continent to these violations of their basic rights? Or how European citizens later filled the streets with protests for months, demanding that the US government publicly apologize to them and compensate them for the damage done to their honor and their economy?
Me neither, because none of that happened. No, official Europe accepted these massive intrusions into its sovereignty with the usual humble smiles and without the slightest protest.
And speaking of intrusions into the sovereignty of the nations of the European Union, it is worth recalling when and why its current migration crisis began. Did it appear out of nowhere? That is what the European establishment press and its American supervisors would like us to think. But the truth is that the European migration crisis is a direct result of the premeditated destruction of Iraq, Libya, and Syria (the straw that really broke the camel’s back) carried out by the US, its faithful ally Israel and the rebel factions paid for by them in those countries between 2004 and 2015.
Have US officials ever publicly apologized for the huge destabilizing effects of this flow of refugees into the EU caused by their warring actions? Have they offered to pay any part of the enormous economic and social costs suffered by Europeans as a direct result of this US-provoked crisis? The answer is clearly “no.”
When a person or entity involved in a relationship supposedly marked by trust and mutual respect turns a blind eye to a series of basic ethical violations carried out by its “partner,” it is, in effect, asking for further and probably even more cruel abuse from its “friend” down the road.
And this is exactly what the United States has done to its European “partners” over the past three years. Seeing the utter inability of European leaders to react to the series of abuses described above, it decided that it was time to complete the grand plan devised by Brzezinski in the late 1990s, which consisted, as we saw, of making the EU break off its potentially very profitable economic and cultural relations with Russia, in order to ensure that Europeans would remain in a position of perpetual subordination in relation to the United States.
How?
Well, exactly as Brzezinski instructed them to do in his 1997 book: by attacking Russia through Ukraine, a move they knew would have the effect of a) causing Europe to buy more weapons from the US, b) making Europe much more dependent on the US for supplies of hydrocarbons and other natural resources, and, if all went according to plan, c) militarily weakening Russia.
The climax of the mafia-style drama penned by the state playwrights of the American deep state occurred on February 7, 2022, when Biden, with German Chancellor Scholz at his side, announced that in the event of war with Russia—something the United States had been trying to provoke for at least eight years by establishing military bases and chemical weapons laboratories in Ukraine and sending them shipments of heavy weapons—the United States would “terminate” the operation of the NordStream II gas pipeline, which, of course, was essential for maintaining German and European economic competitiveness.
And how did Scholz react? By giving one of the best performances of the role of what Spaniards call the “guest of stone” seen in many a year.
By way of contrast, can you imagine the reaction of the United States if the leader of a European country were to have announced, with the American president at his side, that, if he deemed it necessary to do so at a given moment, he would deprive the United States of natural resources that are essential for the continued prosperity of the US economy? Needless to say, his reaction would have been nothing like that of Scholz.
But the pathetic antics of the European political and journalistic establishment did not end there. In the days and weeks after the attack on the gas pipeline, most of the so-called foreign policy “experts” in Spain and Europe not only did not hold the United States responsible for what had obviously been an American attack on its great “ally” Germany, but they often aired explanations that pointed to Putin’s Russia as the real authors of the crime! As if the Russians were going to attack one of the key elements of its plan for long-term economic prosperity.
By now, Europeans were so spellbound by the American propaganda machine implanted in the viscera of their cultures that almost no one with a significant media platform there had the temerity to laugh out loud at the patent stupidity of these “explanations.”
Since the first election of Trump, seen by the American deep state as a threat to its strategic plans, the CIA, USAID, and the network of NGOs paid by them began a campaign to convince their European “partners” of the need to practice censorship – note the impeccable logic—in order to safeguard Democracy.
It was a two-pronged operation. The first and most obvious of these was to provide European elites with the tools to marginalize and/or silence voices within their own populations that were increasingly questioning their pro-Atlanticist policies.
The second was to give the American deep state itself even greater ability to censor and spy on its own citizens.
How?
By taking advantage of the essentially borderless nature of the Internet to subcontract to the Europeans, with their more lax free speech protections, the task of taking actions expressly prohibited by the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
Let’s take, for example, the case of an American media outlet with global ambitions that harshly and persistently criticizes the country’s foreign policy, something which, in turn, greatly irritates the US deep state. The deep state’s sincere wish, of course, is to summarily cancel the outlet. But they know that doing so risks their having possible legal consequences down the road.
So, they simply ask their minions in the European intelligence services to do it for them, thus depriving the outlet with global ambitions of a market of 450 million prosperous consumers. Seeing that continuing their policy of harshly criticizing the US government could deprive them of the possibility of profiting from one of the richest markets in the world, the owners of such a company will, in most cases, end up altering their editorial posture to be less critical of US policies.
In Miguel de Unamuno’s famous Niebla (1914), the protagonist, Augusto Pérez, contemplates suicide. But before carrying out the act, he decides to visit Miguel de Unamuno, a philosopher and the author of a treatise on suicide that he had previously read. When he reveals to the philosopher his desire to end his life, the latter says that he cannot do so because he is a fictional character created by him and, therefore, totally subject to his authorial desires. Augusto replies to his creator that perhaps the creator himself is simply the product of a dream of God. The argument is not resolved. So, Augusto decides to return home, where he dies the next day in unclear circumstances.
The European Union today is a lot like Augusto Pérez. In his present iteration, it is an entity whose vision of what it is, and what its place is and should be in the concert of the world’s nations, has been largely shaped not so much by his own leaders, but by the cultural planners of the American deep state through one of the most audacious, enduring, and successful propaganda programs in world history.
In his Munich speech, JD Vance implicitly reminded Europe that its current political incarnation, marked by an obsession with a Russia supposedly eager to rebuild the Soviet empire, and a desire to minutely control the information diet of its citizens through censorship, is, in effect, their response to a script provided them by the previous political leadership of the US empire, and that he and the new dramaturgs in the White House of today have decided to radically change the text to be followed in regard to both their relations with their American masters, and by extension, those with the rest of the world in the coming years
In his meeting with Zelensky in the Oval Office a few weeks later, Trump did essentially the same thing.
Like Augusto Pérez, the European “leaders” were angry to discover that they were essentially fictitious figures who act daily at the mercy of their puppet masters in Washington. And knowing they are basically powerless to do anything about it, they and their legion of in-house scribes have unleashed a grand concert of yips and yaps that reminds me of a Singing Poodles chorus I once saw at a summer carnival while a child.
Chorus of the Poodles
by Thomas Harrington at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society
The post Chorus of the Poodles was first published by The Brownstone Institute, and is republished under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Please support their efforts.
