Pollitical Observer. .
Dec 15, 2024
Editor: Anne Applebaum/Sikorski on Europe’s True Divide: a comment by Political Observer
Posted on February 7, 2015 by stephenkmacksd
Is the fact that Ms. Applebaum/Mrs. Sikorsky should issue such a ringing endorsement of the demonstrably failed successor to the Free Market Delusion, Austerity, be anything like a surprise?
A number of dissenting opinions on the notion of Austerity’s putative success:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/06/11/economic_austerity_how_it_failed_in_one_chart.html
http://www.salon.com/2015/02/06/joseph_stiglitz_austerity_failed_greece_partner/
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/greece-eurozone-austerity-reform-by-joseph-e–stiglitz-2015-02
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jun/06/how-case-austerity-has-crumbled/
The alliance between the Neo-Cons and the Neo-Liberals is of long standing: Ms. Applebaum is a Neo-Con in all but name. But the fact that her badly cobbled together propaganda realizes itself in this argument : the social/political potency of the idea/practice of ‘national renewal’ as a particular historical/political aspiration across Europe ending in the alliance of Right and Left, as she narrates the story. Need we, as readers, look any further that the Coup Government of Ukraine as an object lesson of this narrative? Right Sector and Svoboda are active participants in that Coup Government. In view of this, should the Greek’s be offered the same tolerance/acceptance that Ms. Applebaum not only accepts but celebrates as worthy of our approbation and material aid in Ukraine?
Please don’t mention the collusion between the banks/investment houses and Greek Oligarchs to hide the reality of the actual condition of Greek indebtedness, it is antithetical to this writer’s ideologically charged essay. The Putin hysteria mongering, Russophobia is a function of The New Cold War rhetoric that the Neo-Cons/R2P zealots have adopted in anticipation of WWIII, and her marriage to Radosław Sikorski Polish politician and journalist.
Political Observer
Editor: Episode MCIII of The American Political Melodrama: Anne Applebaum confronts the Trump victory, and the possible cessation of The New Cold War. Political Cynic comments
Posted on November 29, 2016 by stephenkmacksd
I missed my favorite Neo-Con/New Cold Warrior Anne Applebaum’s November 9,2016 Washington Post commentary on the Trump election. She blocked me from following her twitter account, but her columns are fair game. Here is a telling excerpt from that essay, that clearly demonstrates her status as New Cold Warrior.
A few weeks ago, I spoke at an event attended by commanders of land forces from all across Europe. To a man, they remained grimly committed to their job, which everyone in the room understood to be twofold: protect Europe from terrorism, and protect Europe from Russia. The meeting was led, as is natural in a NATO context, by American generals. Now we can no longer assume that American generals will always be leading such meetings. We also cannot assume that Russian military advances, or hybrid-warfare advances, into Ukraine or the Baltic states will be pushed back by an alliance of like-minded countries.
You could call her what she is, a NATO apologists: ‘…commanders of land forces from all across Europe.’ is indicative of her loyalty. Russian revanchism is met with Western Resolve in the New Cold Warrior mythology. Ms. Applebaum, just one among many Western ‘policy experts’, who have made war with Russia a cause célèbre. She and her allies, like the utterly notorious Nuland/Kagan duo, and fellow travelers the R2P zealots like Samantha Power and Michael Ignatieff, who are Russophobes as acolytes of Isaiah Berlin’s ‘Liberalism’: hallmarks of which are the courtship of the politically powerful and a sycophantic homage to the current political orthodoxy.
Political Cynic
Editor: Neo-Con Anne Applebaum writes on The Never Trumpers, its all in The Family! Political Observer selectively comments
Posted on July 10, 2020 by stephenkmacksd
On the why of the rise of the ‘nativist government’ in Mitteleuropa read ‘Europe Since 1989’ by Phillipp Ther. Chapter 4. Getting on the Neoliberal Bandwagon and Chapter 5. Second-Wave Neoliberalism. These countries rejected any form, of what they considered to be ‘Socialism’, and as a result that Neoliberalism’s toxicity was all pervasive. And was the political precursor of those nativist governments. Applebaum uses this occasion to advertise her book!
I’d had a similar experience myself, in Poland a few years earlier — I’ve described what happened when a nativist government took over the country in my new book, Twilight of Democracy —
The reader has to cultivate patience when reading Applebaum, she is of the Leo Strauss School of self-serving rhetorical bloat, as a means to create an exploitable reader fatigue. That contributes to a wan acceptance, on the part of that reader’s surrender, to what was/is presented as somehow meeting argumentative standards.
After the preliminary cast of characters that establishes a verisimilitude, she has demonstrated her mastery of the politics of her own ménage. Applebaum is a Neo-Conservative and a friend/ally of the Bush Coterie, that has now appears in the political guise of The Lincoln Project and Republican Voters Against Trump.
A more rough hewn, as compared to a once Conservatism of a ‘genteel world’. As a person in her mid fifties, how can she ‘know’ of that world, except by study? She is not just a Political Historian, but an Historian of Sensibilities?
These organisations moved the argument away from the rooms in Washington and into a different sphere. In doing so, they recognised a changed reality: once upon a time, conservative politics was a genteel world where well-written articles for literary magazines or editorial pages could exert great influence. At least at the high end, voters as well as politicians listened to William F Buckley in the National Review or George Will in the Washington Post. The election of 2016 proved that was no longer true. Nowadays, real politics mostly happens somewhere else: in the swamps of social media, in the great battle for attention, in advertising wars and duelling YouTube video clips.
The Lincoln Project waded into those swamps, battles, wars and duels with gusto, drawing fire. Their breakthrough moment was an advertisement on the theme of “Mourning in America” — a direct reference to the famous Ronald Reagan advertisement and slogan, “Morning in America”. The video had sad music, Americans in hospitals and an ominous voiceover: “Under the leadership of Donald Trump, our country is weaker, and sicker and poorer.”
In this essay Applebaum self-presentation is that of outside commentator, when, again, she is a Fellow Traveler.
In its defence, the Lincoln Project’s founders are all former Republican strategists, their real target is Republican voters rather than the president, and they believe that much of the language Republicans are used to hearing from their party is already overwrought. The point is to give them familiar symbols, people and stories with which they can identify, and which will persuade them to turn against the president. Outrage is a tactic needed to break through what feels like a wall of indifference, even in the news media: “It’s not just the consumers of information that are numb,” Weaver told me, “It’s also the conveyors.”
More of Mr. Weaver:
None of these groups are affiliated directly with the Biden campaign, and they don’t want to be. “We’re just blowing up supply lines,” says Weaver. “We’re not responsible for winning the war.”
What reader can forget Mr. Weaver’s other self -congratulatory comment on the French Resistance and supply lines :
“We are like the French resistance. We are blowing up the supply lines,” said John Weaver, a veteran Republican political consultant and one of the co-founders of the group, which is named after President Abraham Lincoln.
https://www.ft.com/content/9d64b55a-0cbe-4e27-b546-6a4cf7c9345b
This followed by more of Applebaum’s jejune political observations, the reader is then presented with this shameless political advocacy, or just call it propaganda!
Follow @projectlincoln and @RVAT2020 if you want to watch them try.
Political Observer
https://www.ft.com/content/69d9d287-6d9c-41f4-901d-8f1a18f4b8e1
Editor: A short review in The Economist of Applebaum’s ‘Twilight’ .
Twilight of Democracy. By Anne Applebaum. Knopf; 224 pages; $16. Penguin; £16.99
Anne Applebaum starts her tale at the point where Mr Davies ends: with the new millennium. On New Year’s Eve the American-born journalist and her husband, Radoslaw Sikorski, who later became Poland’s defence minister and foreign minister, gathered friends at their manor house. The air was crisp with optimism. After decades behind the Iron Curtain Poland had joined NATO and was in the EU’s waiting room. But during the following 20 years the camaraderie crumbled. United by their rejoicing in the collapse of communism, the guests split into liberal and populist-conservative camps. The latter, represented by the Law and Justice party (PiS), is now in power. Over the past eight years it has weakened Poland’s hard-won democracy by packing courts and public media with party loyalists. Other post-communist countries, notably Hungary, experienced similar developments.
In “Twilight of Democracy”, which was published soon after the re-election of the PiS government in 2019, Ms Applebaum, a former correspondent for The Economist, traces how intellectuals—frustrated, self-pitying and opportunistic, in her description—became agents of populism. She names and shames old friends who became leading supporters of the PiS government. Some may play prominent roles in the parliamentary election due in late 2023.
Other liberals have criticised Ms Applebaum’s pro-Western assumptions. In “The Light That Failed”, Ivan Kratsev, a Bulgarian academic, and Stephen Holmes, an American one, argue that eastern Europeans resent being cast as imitators of the progressive West. Populists have seized on their disillusionment. Pro-Western liberals like Ms Applebaum, Mr Krastev says, have tragically failed to respond with a compelling narrative of their own.
Editor : A note on Anne Applebaum’s husband and former writer for the National Review:
Europe | Polish politics
Sikorski in hot water
MORE illegal recordings are destabilising the Polish government this week. The juiciest revelation so far is that the foreign minister, Radek Sikorski (pictured), said in January that he viewed Poland’s alliance with America as “worthless”.
Political Observer
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