Keith Hart on Fri, 2 Jun 2017 14:53:15 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> merkel, macron: europe on its own


>From my perspective, an unsung but major political residue of the Cold
War was the peace/nuclear disarmament/anti-nuclear movement, seen as
a pan-European campaign and not just in Britain. Edward Thompson was
a very powerful voice linking these strands and co-author of the 1980
*Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament.* Has there ever been an
anti-war movement before a big one happened? We sure need one now, but
the left is just following the daily news. A perspective of six months
misses what will turn out to be the social forces shaping our moment
in history.

It is foolish to bracket the US and Russia together, even
rhetorically, just because right now they share autocratic leaders
of unequal weight. The American empire, for all its recent political
mismanagement, is alive and strong: with its share of the world
market, all those weapons and bases, the world currency (even more at
times of radical uncertainty) and the content, hardware, software and
giant firms of the internet economy which is fast becoming the world
economy. The US is still signing up small (and some large) countries
for TRIPS, the intellectual property treaty, while signing bilateral
treaties with each exempting American citizens from future prosecution
for war crimes. The last time I looked, only one European country had
signed one of these. Guess which? Clue: hardly European now, if ever.

Keith

On Fri, Jun 2, 2017 at 9:28 AM, Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>
wrote:

>
> On 2017-06-01 19:13, Morlock Elloi wrote: > The evolution of the
> attitude towards nuclear war from terrible > (1946+) through
> unthinkable (1970s) into impossible (2000+) is a > testament to
> the power of Kool Aid. While the planet was continuously > and
> uninterruptedly ruled based on the military power balances alone,
> > the public discourse ballooned into the 'we got more civilized'
> > stratosphere. This is the most serious sin of the thinking
> class(es).
>
> Nobody thinks that nuclear war is impossible, but most think that
> it should be avoided at all costs, while some begin to think that
> it might be contained and this can be tactically used. Either way,
> there are no determining instances in history, not even the military
> or the secret services.



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