NEW TARIFF THREATS SHOW HOW POINTLESS IT IS TO GROVEL: YOU JUST GET KICKED IN THE FACE ~ punkacademic ~ Britain’s modest contribution to a European attempt to bolster Greenland’s defences in the face of annexation by the United States has met with immediate economic warfare. Trump’s announcement that Denmark and Greenland’s would-be backers would be hit with 10% tariffs from 1 February has left the commentariat struggling to explain how the approach they have lionised for months — Starmer doing whatever Trump wants — has failed. When Trump held court last summer at Turnberry for his vassals to pay homage and subordinate themselves, it was obvious to all but the most delusional European elites that the Emperor was exacting tribute. They, too, would now do all they could to simper and fawn to avoid the worst of it. Even Starmer’s nominal support for Denmark and Greenland was a mere sentence in an obsequious eulogy for the ‘special relationship’ in his address on Monday. The Starmer approach has been praised by state media as cautious, sensible, unlike the “juvenile” idea of standing on principle. And this, it was argued (often by useful idiot Chris Mason), would lead to results. The definition, then, of centrist politics as seen by its true believers: astute manipulation. Starmer and the leaders of other European countries even failed to leave X for fear of offending Elon Musk. Except it was all total bullshit. Starmer’s tech deal is dead. Von der Leyen’s EU deal is dead too. Trump’s announcement of new tariffs proves the point that grovelling, as NATO General Secretary Mark Rutte memorably did, is pointless. You just get kicked in the face. According to the Guardian, ‘some Greenland residents are now preparing for the worst, either stocking up on supplies or readying themselves to flee quickly’. So much for 3D chess. Leaders will not, in the end, ‘protect’ you. Britons should worry too. Politically, the UK is uniquely exposed amongst European nations to the change of weather in the US. After Brexit divided Britain from the EU and did severe harm to the UK economy, successive British governments bet the farm on a deal with a country over three thousand miles away, instead of the trading bloc twenty miles away. Britain’s military, too, is reliant on its US overlord. From nukes to F-35s, Britain is in hock to America. US nukes are parked up at Lakenheath, 80 miles northeast of London. But whilst the military is to the forefront of the mind when states ‘beef’ (as Bakunin knew they always would), the dependence of Britain and other European states on the US is more prosaic. British and European tech infrastructure is overwhelmingly dependent on hardware and software provided by US firms. Apart from the headline-grabbing contracts being awarded to Peter Thiel’s Palantir by the government on everything from health data to defence targeting, most businesses rely on US-based cloud hosting and software-as-a-service, provided by the likes of Amazon and Microsoft. The Dutch government recently was forced to nationalise, then privatise, a Dutch tech company in response to US whims as Trump sought a deal with China. British ‘leaders’ long cultivated a delusion that Britain could be ‘Greece to America’s Rome’ — providing quality and wisdom to a younger, more powerful, partner. Again bullshit, but it allowed generations of British politicians to languish in shibboleths such as ‘our armed forces are the best in the world’ because they’d seen Roger Moore ski off a cliff with a Union Jack parachute after they’d eaten their Sunday roast. Other European nations were less delusional, notably France with its longstanding scepticism of American influence and the NATO project. But most Western European nations’ political elites subscribed to a view of the US as an essentially-benign imperial power — at least as far as they were concerned. Whilst the US was happily killing millions in ‘anti-communist’ wars around the world, European nations — as Vincent Bevins notes in The Jakarta Method — were allowed to have social democratic welfare states. The common thread of course was white supremacy. The US would tolerate things in Western Europe that it wouldn’t elsewhere. Now that tolerance is gone. The US National Security Strategy, recently published, is an imperialist’s dream and arrogates to the US the power to intervene in Western European countries, ostensibly to defend the West in a doctrine that is essentially a repackaged far-right conspiracy theory. As anarchists we are no apologists for states or for warmongering institutions such as NATO. But the unvarnished reality of empire red in tooth and claw abroad is not distinct from the terror visited upon US citizens by ICE, including the murder of Renee Nicole Good. But that means the response isn’t either. States cannot solve the problems states create. The American state’s wars against its own people or those abroad will not be ended by rival militaries. They will be stopped by people acting collectively, in the US and around the world. As ICE has been driven out of restaurants, chased back to their compounds, publicly named and shamed by citizen journalists, so too can the mass power of people drive out US bases from countries around the globe and mass non-compliance, mass boycotts of US goods, deliver effects. The likes of Keir Starmer can never save us. We can only save ourselves. Greenlanders, Minnesotans, all of us know this in our core. With thousands of people marching on the US consulate in Greenland, this power is visible. And when made visible, it can also be broken. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Images: Wikimedia Commons, White House on Flickr The post Only people, not ‘leaders’, can stop Trump’s empire appeared first on Freedom News.

THE FILMMAKER’S SOCIAL REALISM WAS ALWAYS SUSPICIOUS OF ESTABLISHED POWER ~ Bleart Thaçi ~ Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr died on 6 January at the age of 70, after a long illness. His body of work stands among the most severe and distinctive in late twentieth century European cinema, ranging from the early social dramas Family Nest, The Outsider, The Prefab People, Almanac of Fall and Damnation to the later landmark films Sátántangó, Werckmeister Harmonies and The Turin Horse. Discussion of Tarr has often centred on style and form, on duration, repetition or bleakness, yet his films were shaped just as much by a political outlook formed early and articulated consistently throughout his life. Tarr described himself, without hesitation, as an anarchist. In interviews late in life, Tarr spoke openly about his political formation during his final years of high school. He said that he identified with the far left, recalling that he no longer carried a school-bag, since Mao’s Little Red Book in his pocket was enough. He described himself as a committed communist until around the age of sixteen. What followed was a break rather than a conversion. He came to believe that the leaders he had been taught to admire were false communists, concerned with authority and control rather than emancipation. From that point, he distanced himself from communism as it was practised and presented to him. This suspicion of established power remained a constant. Tarr did not move towards liberalism, nor did he align himself with nationalist opposition. His comments suggest a settled distrust of political systems that claim moral authority while reproducing hierarchy. In later public appearances, he spoke sharply about the historical record of communism, at one point remarking that he had never seen a good communist. His political views were shaped as much by circumstance as by ideology, and when plans to study philosophy fell through he went to work at the Óbuda shipyards. Living and working among industrial labourers informed what he later called his social cinema. His earliest films emerged from the Budapest School and the Béla Balázs Studio, an experimental and semi-underground environment that favoured small budgets, amateur equipment and non professional actors. These films focused on housing shortages, unstable employment, the pressure of economic conditions on personal relationships or the wear of poverty on everyday relations. Tarr spoke of being close to working class people and of wanting to record daily life as it was, rather than impose symbolic narratives. Frame from Satantango He often explained that his turn to filmmaking came from frustration with cinema itself. Films, he said, were full of false stories that bore little resemblance to lived experience. Making films became a way of showing conditions as they were, without embellishment or instruction. This approach extended to his working methods. He avoided professional polish, relied on non actors, and resisted narrative forms that dictated meaning from above. These choices reflected a broader opposition to authority rather than an attempt to promote a fixed political programme. As his career developed, Tarr became more outspoken about contemporary politics. He was an atheist and a consistent critic of nationalism. In a 2016 interview, he described Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán and Marine Le Pen as national shames, framing his criticism in explicitly moral terms. His denunciation of nationalism was especially pointed in the Hungarian context (under the aforementioned prime minister), where he became an outspoken critic of the state’s handling of migration and asylum. During the European migration crisis, Tarr wrote a statement that was displayed near a pro-migration exhibition in front of the Hungarian Parliament. “We have brought the planet to the brink of catastrophe with our greediness and our unlimited ignorance… Now, we are confronted with the victims of our acts.” In it, he argued that Europe had helped bring about global catastrophe through greed, ignorance and wars waged for exploitation. He then asked what kind of morality was being defended when fences were built to keep out people displaced by those same actions. In his final years, Tarr continued to speak out publicly, even as his health declined. In December 2023, he was among a group of filmmakers who signed an open letter (alongside Pedro Costa, Aki Kaurismäki, Claire Denis, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Christian Petzold, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jia Zhangke, etc.) calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, an end to the killing of civilians, the establishment of humanitarian corridors, and the release of Israeli hostages. To remember Béla Tarr is to remember a filmmaker for whom politics was neither decorative nor secondary. His anarchism was not a posture but an orientation that shaped how he lived, how he worked and how he spoke. It remains present in his films as a cinema that refuses obedience, legitimacy, or consolation in the face of power. The post Béla Tarr (1955-2026) appeared first on Freedom News.

AS A NEW CHANCELLOR IS INAUGURATED, GERMAN COMPANIES ARE PREPARING TO INCREASE ARMS PRODUCTION AND STOP RELYING ON US PROTECTION ~ Omar Kardoudi, El Confidencial ~ The geopolitical shift in the landscape brought about by Donald Trump’s arrival in the White House has forced European countries to develop their own defence plans. And moves among European companies have not been long in falling into line. Europe’s largest arms manufacturer, the German company Rheinmetall, has announced that it will reorganise its facilities in Berlin and Neuss, which until now manufactured automobile parts, to produce ammunition and other defence products. According to the company’s plans, both factories would become part of Rheinmetall’s Arms and Ammunition division and serve as hybrid plants. This, they claim, allows for the manufacture of weapons while ensuring part of the existing automobile production. The company states that no final decisions have yet been made regarding the new factory structure. However, they they have said that the facilities will not process explosives, but will instead produce protective and mechanical components for military use. “Above all, the plants will benefit from the industrial strength of the Rheinmetall Group as a leading supplier of military equipment, as well as from high customer demand in Germany and around the world,” Rheinmetall sources told Reuters. “We are well prepared and have no reason to be timid: we must act now for security in Europe,” said Armin Papperger, the company’s CEO. Rheinmetall is not the only German company transforming its civilian facilities into military production plants. Earlier this month, KNDS Deutschland announced its intention to convert its railway carriage manufacturing plant in Goerlitz, in the east of the country, to produce armoured vehicles such as the LEOPARD 2 tank and the PUMA infantry fighting vehicle. A BET ON MILITARY SPENDING Trump’s pressure on Europe to increase its military spending and the recent security summit held in Munich following the US president’s sidelining the EU and Ukraine in peace talks with Russia have caused the shares of European arms manufacturers to soar. The STOXX Aerospace and Defence Index (.SXPARO) reached all-time highs last week. Investors are betting that European governments will ramp up spending on weapons and military equipment to alleviate their defence dependence on the US. “For me, it will be an absolute priority to strengthen Europe as soon as possible so that, step by step, we truly stop depending on the United States,” said Friedrich Merz, the likely new German chancellor, in a television talk show with the main candidates in the German general elections. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Image: Andre Potzler CC BY 2.0 The post Germany prepares for war appeared first on Freedom News.

DISCUSSING THE NEWS OF THE WEEK, WHICH CONTINUES MOMENTOUS NOT JUST IN THE US. GIVEN THE EU’S PLANS TO DROP 800 BILLION EUROS ON DEFENCE, WE SAVE A PARTICULAR FOCUS FOR THE ECONOMIC AND CULTURAL IMPLICATIONS With money flowing towards production and the need to drag the next generation of youth into patriotic camoflage, what threats are ahead? The post Anarchist News Review: Peckham rallies, Teslas torched and EU remilitarises appeared first on Freedom News.