At the end of June, 2021, the EU collapsed into emotional melt-down. It occurred when Charles Michel, Council President, decided to move up a summit debate on LGBTQI and EU values — in a reaction to a letter of concern drafted by 17 Council members.
Dutch PM, Rutte, used the moment ‘to go nuclear’ (as he had earlier promised), saying in advance of the summit that: “My goal is to bring Hungary to its knees on this issue.
And, at the summit itself, Rutte threatened that Hungary “must repeal” its (allegedly) “anti-gay law”, and respect fundamental human rights, “which are not negotiable — or they must leave [the Union]”.
Rutte acknowledged that “I can’t push them out”. He argued however, that Orbán’s (alleged) ‘anti-gay’ law “seriously contradicts the values that Europe stands for”, and insisted that they were not up for debate.
Should the EU not act now, it would stop being a union of values and would become a mere trade bloc, Rutte insisted. The debate then descended into the highly personal and emotional.
The start to this ‘culture war’ reaches back to the 1990’s, when Hungary and Poland “led eastern Europe in economic shock therapy, pushing market reforms beyond what their western advisers demanded.
But in cultural terms, the Polish and Hungarian Right chose a more conservative course”. In particular, rather than open his nation’s border to offset population decline, Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian Prime Minister, looked to the nuclear family as the key route to spur national growth.
Since 2010, which marked the start of Orbán’s role as prime minister, the number of marriages among Hungarians has increased by 89.5%; and the fertility rate is rising.
Both these states nonetheless, continue to see themselves as deeply European, even as they have steered further away from the EU valorisation of cosmopolitanism as its nuclear primordial cultural end, to be brought about through open borders, and the consequent voluntary mixing of large numbers of diverse peoples.
Orbán is far from alone in his traditionalist stand. In Rome, as one example, the Vatican has taken the unusual step of making a diplomatic démarche to the Italian government concerning a draft bill.
The law, known as the Zan bill (after gay activist lawmaker Alessandro Zan), was approved last year by Italy’s lower house and has since been fiercely debated in the Senate.
The bill would explicitly categorize violence against LGBTQI people as a hate crime, making it akin to a racial or an antisemitic attack, whilst prescribing harsh penalties for any infringement.
The leader of the League (Party), Salvini, said it would punish those “who think a mom is a mom; and a dad is a dad”. Many ordinary Italians would agree.
And, as in America, parents don’t care for their children being taught Critical Race Theory, either.
The latter stems from a school of thought amongst post-Russian Revolution Marxist intellectuals who were disturbed by the fact that communist revolution didn’t sweep Europe, just as Marx had predicted.
This revisionist ‘Race Theory’ updated ‘Marx’ to being a struggle between ‘who has power in society, and who doesn’t’, instead of a class struggle.
Both Marxist variants however, rely on the disruptive dualism of the oppressor versus the oppressed, that is intended to set layers of society into conflict one with another.
And this is what it is doing: With a younger generation severed and at odds with their parents, whom they are being taught to see as congenital racists.
The power of political leaders in China and Russia trumps the oligarchic machinations (they go to goal). It was not always so.
Cosmopolitan oligarchs came within a hair’s breadth of literally stealing Russia under Yeltsin; but then Putin entered the frame – to spoil it all. The oligarchs are still extremely cross.
People they don’t need anymore. These people have been a problem recently. Not only are they a drag on the system, they have been actively interfering with it.
Like voting for Brexit, electing Donald Trump, refusing to abandon their traditional values and outmoded ideas (e.g. national sovereignty, freedom of speech, and mammalian biology) and to get on board with global capitalist ideology – and have been otherwise a real pain in the ass.
So when the Re-set – the ‘New Normal’ – was unveiled at Davos, millions of people were already living a reality in which facts no longer mattered at all, where things that never happened officially – happened.
And other things that obviously happened never happened: not officially, that is – they were “far-right extremist” conspiracy theories, “fake news,” or “disinformation,” or whatever – despite the fact that people knew that they weren’t.
How then would Davos propose to slide humanity into this ‘new normal’? Well, perchance Davos man wants to go in the opposite direction to epistemological purity?
That is, it seeks to generate a lot of contradictory realities, not just contradictory ideologies, but actual mutually-exclusive realities, which could not possibly simultaneously exist … which would still freak people out pretty badly.
This could become the mental ‘blank page’ on which the deliberately fluid realities of cosmopolitanist gender, and self-defining identities, might be written.
The oligarchic Elect now seek to ‘unvalue’ all remaining national values, untether national cohesion – for its logical objective is not to author a new ideology (it doesn’t need that).
But, rather, to impose a single global, mercantilist order through first, the monetisation of every possible ‘thing’, and then its ‘capitalisation’ into fresh financial ‘assets’.
So what will global oligarchy’s ‘Conquest of Absolutely Everything’ look like? A world of atomized consumers, stripped of their rights and of any allegiances to family, or clan, or nation, or religion, or even to meaningful cultural appreciation.
Nevertheless, a globalist world, for the few who aspire to grow immensely wealthy in it, is still understood to be a veritable cornucopia of uncountable material satisfactions. A magic carpet they would be loath to abandon.
Yet, anxieties are rising, even amongst the billionaires. The world is tacking in new uncertain directions. To throw in one’s lot now with the ‘masters of the universe’ may ultimately prove to have been but a fleeting chimaera.
For ‘the many’, on the other hand, the tech and robotic Re-set, proclaimed by the Davos crowd, will be a place of glorified slavery, lived in deserts of social isolation.
To the extent that some amongst ‘the many’ have seen what a tech Re-set has in store for them, they don’t like it. It smacks of totalitarianism, of tech-feudalism – and they have started to oppose it.
They are then … ‘populists’. Which is to say, they become a huge problem for their masters. No wonder, the EU Council summit was so heated and distraught.
Strategic Culture / ABC Flash Point News 2021.
