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.

YESTERDAY’S DAY OF ACTION SAW BLOQUONS TOUT STEPPING OUT OF THE SHADOWS NATIONWIDE—AND FACING MAJOR POLICE REPRESSION ~ punkacademic ~ Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in France on Wednesday (10 September) as the first day of action organised under the banner Bloquons Tout (“Block Everything”) saw widespread protests and blockades in defence of jobs, pensions, and public services. By the evening, mainstream news outlets reported 812 individual actions across the country, along with 262 blockades. The police had deployed 80,000 police officers and gendarmes, making over 500 arrests by late afternoon. Government sources had been briefing that only 100 thousand protestors could be expected to turn out, but the Interior Ministry conceded that the numbers on the streets had been at least double that. The CGT said that a quarter of a million people had mobilised in the course of the day, while anti-capitalist website Contre Attaque reported up to 360 thousand protesters. https://contre-attaque.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/signal-2025-09-10-125917.mp4 Several universities closed in anticipation of potential occupations, and local authorities across the country pre-emptively ordered shops and businesses to close—effectively surrendering before action began. In Paris, a major demonstration took place at the Place de la Republique, and at Les Halles the shopping complex was blocked off to prevent access. Another demonstration against the government’s foreign policy and in support of Palestinian freedom took place at the Gare du Nord, where a thousand protestors attempted to enter the station. Activists also attempted to blockade the Paris ring road, but these actions were only briefly successful, as police on motorbikes dismounted and brutally pursued the protestors. Paris, Place des Fêtes Outside of Paris, blockades had greater success. Huge crowds marched in Marseille and Rennes, where a bus was torched and major roads effectively blocked. In the northern town of Laon, the Anarchist Federation was involved in actions alongside feminist comrades, opening a free thrift store which was attacked by police. One comrade described scenes of ‘almost unprecedented violence‘. With Macron’s most recent Prime Minister, Francois Bayrou, toppled by the National Assembly days before the mobilisation, tensions were heightened by the President’s choice of conservative defence minister Sebastien Lecornu as a replacement. Many protestors cited Bayrou’s budget cuts as a motivator, with Lecornu’s appointment seen as clear evidence that the oligarchical politics of Macronism would never change. Supermarket action, Perpignan The mainstream media has characterised Bloquons Tout as far left extremists and implying far-right involvement. There has been a persistent sneer at the idea of a ‘leaderless’ movement, betraying the anxiety caused to social and political elites. While the unions have only called a major day of action on 18 September, strikes already took place yesterday at hospitals bearing the brunt of cuts, building the momentum towards a continued wave of disruption. The post France blockades: The leaderless escalate appeared first on Freedom News.