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.

WITH AMERICAN NUKES BACK IN BRITAIN, FREEDOM’S EDITORIAL AT THE HEIGHT OF THE COLD WAR COULD AS WELL HAVE BEEN WRITTEN TODAY ~ punkacademic ~ In its 4 October 1981 issue, Freedom laid out an unequivocal case against nuclear weapons under the bold heading, THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE. 1981 was the height of the Cold War, with Reagan in office and sabre-rattling at its peak. A month earlier, protests had begun at the Greenham Common RAF base against the siting of US cruise missiles there. These protests, famously feminist and often referred to in the media as ‘the Greenham Women’, featured spectacular acts of direct action as the years went on, including tens of thousands of women encircling the base, the perimeter fence torn down, and protestors dancing on missile bunkers. The Peace Camp there became an iconic symbol of resistance to patriarchy. The piece reproduced here is that cover editorial, which preceded an issue of Freedom accompanied by a supplement focused on the threat of nuclear weapons. The cover editorial included a map of US bases in the UK, including familiar names such as Greenham Common and Lakenheath. Commenting on the prospect of the neutron bomb Freedom considered it a tell on the true nature of government that states would seek to develop a weapon that would annihilate people but preserve property. The 1980s were an era when nuclear weapons were ubiquitous in popular culture. The decade kicked off with Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s haunting Enola Gay reaching number 8 in the UK charts. In 1983-84, films such as The Day After in the US and Threads in the UK brought the horror of nuclear war home to TV audiences (both films were TV movies, which heightened their impact). And again in ’84, the first glimpses of a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles where humanity battled for survival against a malevolent artificial intelligence which had triggered a nuclear holocaust to exterminate them were seen in James Cameron’s The Terminator. The iconography of nuclear war is hardly as prevalent now, but maybe it should be. To go in reverse, news broke this week that the major AI research company Anthropic have built a mechanism into their Claude chatbot aimed at preventing it from building a nuclear weapon. At the same time, news also broke that major AIs such as ChatGPT and Grok are developing a resistance to being turned off. For those who remember, Skynet didn’t actually build the nukes in Terminator, but it did come to control them. And it reacted very badly to those who tried to turn it off. Closer to home, Greenham Common may be no more thanks in no small part to the efforts of thousands of feminists, but Lakenheath is very much alive and kicking and, as of this summer, once again home to US nuclear weapons. Worse still, planning permission (how twee!) has gone in with the local council for modifications to the site to house new munitions facilities. It’s also come out that the council has no evacuation plan in case of a nuclear accident. Alas. Nuclear weapons are both a moral obscenity and, as the editorial alludes to, the ultimate representation of what government is. The ability for the government of some to simply delete the population of others at the stroke of a key is the ultimate rebuttal of any ‘contractarian’ justification for it. Hobbes claimed government was justified by the provision of security; tell that to those it disintegrates. THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE THE development of nuclear weapons has always brought with it its own brand of specious justification. The first Atomic Bombs, as dropped on Japan, were justified because they ‘saved lives by bringing the war to a speedy conclusion’. The Hydrogen Bomb. as developed by both America and Russia, was defended by the ghastly logic that they maintained a ‘balance of terror’ since both sides were afraid to use them. The appalling destruction, uncontrollable fall-out and long-term poisoning by radiation of land and spelled too much danger for the world’s rulers, who would be destroyed along with the rest of us. The latest development has brought with it a new justification – it can be controlled! The Neutron Bomb, dubbed by the Soviets as the ‘Capitalist Bomb’ — which doesn’t mean they won’t develop one themselves — was originally said to ‘kill people but leave property untouched’ and to have a very short life of radioactive contamination. Conquered territory could be occupied by the victors in a battle in a relatively short time. Because of this, it is now being justified because it would be limited in its use to ‘the theatre of war’ itself, and not used as a terror weapon against civilian populations. Messrs Reagan and Haig are now speaking openly of the possibility of waging war in Europe (that’s America’s ‘Theatre’) with neutron bombs to overcome the Soviet’s alleged superiority over NATO in numbers of conventional weapons. What does this mean‘? It means quite simply that war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries can now be contemplated, safe in the understanding that it can be contained within battlefield Europe. What bloody nonsense! Can anybody believe for a moment that if the commanders of either side saw themselves losing such a conflict (and one side must lose!) that they would not call up their intercontinental missiles to strike at the heartland of the enemy‘? Both sides now have enough megatons to destroy the world ‘several times over’ —and we know enough of the ruthlessness of the world’s rulers to know that they would not hesitate to use them once the chips were down. Neutron bombs, therefore, precisely because they sound more ‘controllable’, are even more dangerous than their predecessors, because nuclear war is now becoming thinkable in tactical terms by the lunatics who rule the world – instead of being unthinkable. It is time we all linked cause and effect. Governments are bringing us to the brink of annihilation — it is time we began to think of government itself as unthinkable! The post Radical Reprint: Against Armageddon appeared first on Freedom News.