English

Written by Alex Newman

Monday, 07 May 2012

As Latin American governments continue marching toward ever-closer “integration” under transnational bodies like the socialist-dominated Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), regional leaders are now calling for what essentially amounts to a continental police force. The authoritarian regime ruling Venezuela, meanwhile, is attempting to erect a new hemispheric “human rights commission” that excludes the U.S. government.

During a ministerial UNASUR meeting held in Cartagena last week, senior officials representing the 12 member governments demanded the creation of a regional “Council for Public Safety, Justice and Cooperation.” According to the member-states’ Ministers in attendance — Justice, Interior, Defense, and Foreign Relations — transnational crime represents among the most serious problems facing the region.

“One of the major threats to democracy today comes from the power of organized crime that establishes or seeks to establish, in some places, a sort of parallel power and tries to control portions of the state,” explained Peru’s Foreign Minister Rafael Roncagliolo. “Organized crime not only represents a major transnational economic power but also a threat to the states.”

There are numerous different criminal problems ravishing Latin America, officials explained during the summit. The trafficking of drugs, humans, and weapons, for example, are among the most serious threats. Other criminal enterprises that officials said should be tackled jointly include illegal mining, money laundering, corruption, cybercrime, and more.

“Crime knows nothing about borders, and the struggle against it will only be effective if it is based on cooperation from all countries,” said Colombian Defense Minister Juan Carlos Pinzon during a speech at the summit, urging his counterparts throughout South America and various government ministries to create new regional bodies to oversee the efforts. In addition to Colombia, the regional body includes Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Chile, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Speaking to reporters after the UNASUR meetings, Pinzon reiterated his demands and claimed that there was popular support for the controversial scheme. “There is now a broad consensus in South America to address transnational crime in a coordinated manner,” the Defense chief was quoted as saying. It was not immediately clear whether he was referring to a “consensus” among government officials or the people of the region.

According to news reports, the summit concluded by calling for the formation of a working group to develop laws and an “action plan” to create the new regional security body. Before becoming official, however, the proposed council must be approved at an upcoming gathering of UNASUR member presidents this July.

Though not formally discussed during last week’s summit, the Hugo Chavez regime in Venezuela took the opportunity to push for a new regional “human rights commission.” Under the proposal, which could take shape through any number of transnational integration entities developing in Latin America, the socialist ruler would consider leaving the “Inter-American Commission on Human Rights” because of the U.S. government’s influence over it.

“We are hoping that through UNASUR, through CELAC [Community of Latin American and Caribbean States], we can quickly … create organizations linked to the issue of human rights,” Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro was quoted as saying by the Associated Press, apparently suggesting a push for a novel understanding of the term human rights. The U.S. government – Chavez calls it the “Yankee Empire” – would not be invited to participate.

Meanwhile, Colombia, which has traditionally been perceived as a bulwark against the surging “pink tide” socialist domination of the continent, is now cheerleading for the integration process, too. But as the national government continues to surrender sovereignty to the rapidly expanding continental apparatus, the Colombian people will undoubtedly find themselves increasingly governed by the region’s totalitarian-minded regimes.

Ironically, most of the Marxist narco-terrorist groups waging a decades-long war against Colombia, including the infamous Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), are closely affiliated with governments in the region. The government of Brazil – a key driver in the expansion of the regional left and the “integration” process – has even been sheltering FARC leader Francisco Antonio Cadena (also known as Oliverio Medina) despite his being wanted by Colombian authorities on terrorism charges.

“The pro-communist government in Brazil did not only assure political asylum to Mr. Medina, but even gave a public office to his wife. This generous gift was an initiative of [current Brazilian President] Mrs. Dilma Roussef, a member of [former President] Lula’s Cabinet at that time,” acclaimed Brazilian author and philosopher Prof. Olavo de Carvalho, an expert on the communist resurgence in the region, told The New American in an e-mail. “She denied the fact, but later some hard-nosed journalists found her signature on the appointment decree.”

Throughout Latin America, a shadowy alliance of socialist and communist political parties, criminal groups, and other organizations are seizing power under the innocuously named “Foro de Sao Paulo” (FSP), or Sao Paulo Forum. Formed by former Brazilian President Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva, communist dictator Fidel Castro, the Sandinistas, and other prominent characters, the network has remained largely below the radar despite controlling some two thirds of the region’s governments.

But according to Prof. Carvalho – who played a crucial role in publicly exposing the FSP – Colombia’s Marxist guerillas still maintain close ties to Brazil’s ruling elite. “The alliance between the Workers’ Party (Lula’s party) and the FARC is not a matter of conjecture, but an absolute certainty, since Mr. Lula presided over the São Paulo Forum for many years in close association with Manuel Marulanda, the high commander of the Colombian guerilla,” he explained. “The fact is confirmed by the proceedings of the Forum general assemblies.”

Still, despite the well-known nexus between Marxist terror networks and politics in the region, even Colombia’s new President Juan Manuel Santos threw his support behind UNASUR’s effort to erect the new continental crime-fighting body. “Only together can we end transnational organized crime,” Santos was quoted as saying after the summit. “Criminals must know that there will not be a single place where they can hide when nations come together.”

UNASUR, which officially came into force last year, has been quickly expanding its role in the region. Modeled after the European Union, the entity and its affiliates have already created a dizzying array of integration schemes on everything from military cooperation and security to health and energy. And last year, two socialists were selected to become the continental body’s first leaders – one from Colombia, the other from Venezuela.

After witnessing the spectacular crisis surrounding the Euro in recent years, Latin American governments decided to put their own single-currency scheme on hold. But the EU has already created its own fledgling law enforcement agency known as Europol, and Latin American governments seem determined to follow in Europe’s footsteps.

UNASUR and other regional entities like CELAC and the overtly socialist ALBA, meanwhile, continue to rapidly expand and consolidate power at the expense of national sovereignty. The process is often helped along by the U.S. government — albeit quietly — despite Latin American claims that empowering the transnational bodies will reduce American influence there.

Meanwhile, Russia and China are becoming increasingly influential in the hemisphere, pouring massive investment into the region while cooperating closely with national governments. Leaders like Chavez have hailed the developments, claiming to be creating what he touted as a “New World Order” during a trip to Beijing.

Critics, however, are not quite as enthusiastic – and many are fighting back, arguing that what the region needs is more freedom, not more government or more integration. The new order, opponents say, will almost certainly be darker than the old; especially for the populations of the relatively liberty-minded nations like Costa Rica and Chile that are still standing.

Fonte: The New American

Olavo de Carvalho

debateolavodugin.blogspot.com, 6 de julho de 2011

Marginal note to the debate with Aleksandr Duguin

On January 25, 1904, the geographer and political scientist Halford J. Mackinder (1861-1947) presented to the Royal Geographic Society the thesis that Central Asia was the “pivot of History” and that in the following decades Russia, based on that area, was in a most advantageous position to expand its power. [1]

Halford J. Mackinder

With no intention of creating a general theory of History, or of postulating a geographical determinism à la Buckle, and rather recognizing that all he could do was to speculate about “some aspects” of the geographical determinants of the historical process, Mackinder stressed that geography imposed precise limits upon human initiative, favoring some actions and rendering others difficult.

The geographical configuration of the Russian steppe had specially favored the action of nomadic hordes which, coming from the depths of Asia, rode through the area on horseback to invade Western Europe. [2] The consequences of this had been portentous:

“A repellent personality performs a valuable social function in uniting his enemies and it was under the pressure of external barbarism that Europe achieved her civilization.” [3]

“For a thousand years a series of horse-riding peoples emerged from Asia through the broad interval between the Ural mountains and the Caspian sea, rode through the open spaces of southern Russia, and struck home into Hungary in the very heart of the European peninsula, shaping by the necessity of opposing them the history of each of the great peoples around—the Russians, the Germans, the French, the Italians, and the Byzantine Greeks.” [4]

What swayed the tides of fate in favor of the Europeans were two factors. First, the intrinsic limitations of the barbarians’ attack potential:

“That [the barbarian invasion] stimulated healthy and powerful reaction, instead of crushing opposition under a widespread despotism, was due to the fact that the mobility of their power was conditioned by the steppes, and necessarily ceased in the surrounding forests and mountains.” [5]

Secondly, the evolution of maritime technique, which inaugurated the era of the great navigations:

“The all-important result of the discovery of the Cape road to the Indies was to connect the western and eastern coastal navigations of Euro- Asia, . . . and thus in some measure to neutralize the strategical advantage of the central position of the steppe – nomads by pressing upon them in rear. The revolution commenced by the great mariners of the Columbian generation endowed Christendom with the widest possible mobility of power…

“The broad political effect was to reverse the relations of Europe and Asia, for whereas in the Middle Ages Europe was caged between an impassable desert to south, an unknown ocean to west, and icy or forested wastes to north and north-east, and in the east and south-east was constantly threatened by the superior mobility of the horsemen and camelmen, she now emerged upon the world, multiplying more than thirty-fold the sea surface and coastal lands to which she had access”. [6]

But this did not lead to the end of land-power. If this kind of power was concentrated in the East, while the West further developed maritime power, it was not only due to diversity of geographic conditions, but because of a difference of cultures:

“It is probably one of the most striking coincidences of history that the seaward and the landward expansion of Europe should, in a sense, continue the ancient opposition between Roman and Greek. Few great failures have had more far-reaching consequences than the failure of Rome to Latinize the Greek. The Teuton was civilized and Christianized by the Roman, the Slav in the main by the Greek. It is the Romano-Teuton who in later times embarked upon the ocean; it was the Graeco-Slav who rode over the steppes, conquering the Turanian. Thus the modern land-power differs from the sea-power no less in the source of its ideals than in the material conditions of its mobility.”

If the era of the great navigations had favored Europe, in more recent times, the evolution of technique indicated that land-power, hence Euro-Asia, received a fresh invigoration:

“A generation ago steam and the Suez canal appeared to have increased the mobility of sea-power relatively to land-power. Railways acted chiefly as feeders to ocean-going commerce. But transcontinental railways are now transmuting the conditions of land-power, and nowhere can they have such effect as in the closed heart-land of Euro- Asia, in vast areas of which neither timber nor accessible stone was available for road-making. . . The Russian army in Manchuria is as significant evidence of mobile land-power as the British army in South Africa was of sea-power.” [7]

In the medium term, everything favored Russian hegemony:

“The spaces within the Russian Empire and Mongolia are so vast, and their potentialities in population, wheat, cotton, fuel, and metals so incalculably great, that it is inevitable that a vast economic world, more or less apart, will there develop inaccessible to oceanic commerce.”

At this point came a decisive generalization, which would make Mackinder famous:

“As we consider this rapid review of the broader currents of history, does not a certain persistence of geographical relationship become evident? Is not the pivot region of the world’s politics that vast area of Euro-Asia which is inaccessible to ships, but in antiquity lay open to the horse-riding nomads, and is today about to be covered with a network of railways?
. . . Russia replaces the Mongol Empire. Her pressure on Finland, on Scandinavia, on Poland, on Turkey, on Persia, on India, and on China, replaces the centrifugal raids of the steppemen. In the world at large she occupies the central strategical position held by Germany in Europe. She can strike on all sides and be struck from all sides, save the north. The full development of her modern railway mobility is merely a matter of time.” [8]

And the prediction that would become so influential on international politics in the twentieth century:

“The oversetting of the balance of power in favour of the pivot state, resulting in its expansion over the marginal lands of Euro-Asia, would permit of the use of vast continental resources for fleet-building, and the empire of the world would then be in sight. This might happen if Germany were to ally herself with Russia. The threat of such an event should, therefore, throw France into alliance with the over-sea powers, and France, Italy, Egypt, India, and Korea would become so many bridge heads where the outside navies would support armies to compel the pivot allies to deploy land forces and prevent them from concentrating their whole strength on fleets. . . . The development of the vast potentialities of South America might have a decisive influence upon the system. They might strengthen the United States…”

JR Nyquist

February 18, 2011

This week I had the pleasure of interviewing the Brazilian philosopher, and president of the Inter-American Institute, Olavo de Carvalho. During the conversation I suggested that something is wrong with our thinking today; that we don’t worship in the same way, or obey the rules in the same way, or observe common courtesy as we once did. “To someone like me,” he began, “who visited this country in the 1980s, and came back to live here in 2005, the changes that the American mind has undergone in recent decades are really shocking.”