Tens of Thousands of People Have Disappeared on Their Way to Europe

The United Nations, European Parliament and many leading human rights groups are condemning Greece for putting on trial 24 volunteer rescue workers who helped save thousands of migrants fleeing violence, poverty and persecution. The Greek government has accused 24 individuals connected to the group Emergency Response Centre International of smuggling — for giving life-saving assistance to migrants who were trying to reach Europe.

A spokesperson for the U.N. high commissioner for human rights said, quote, “Trials like this are deeply concerning because they criminalize life-saving work and set a dangerous precedent. Indeed, there has already been a chilling effect, with human rights defenders and humanitarian organisations forced to halt their human rights work in Greece and other EU countries,” unquote.

A European Parliament report described the trial as Europe’s, quote, “largest case of criminalization of solidarity.”

This comes as a new article in The New Yorker has just been published, titled “The Crisis of Missing Migrants,” which examines what’s become of the tens of thousands of people

— source democracynow.org | Jan 13, 2023

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Is Europe Deindustrialising?

European industry is reeling under the twin threat of high energy prices and President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) which, in essence, bribes Europe’s green industries to migrate to the United States. Are Europe’s industrial heartlands about to become rustbelts? Will Germany experience the trauma that Britain suffered as its factories closed, compelling its high-skilled manufacturing-based labor force to accept low-skill, low-productivity, low-wage jobs?
The threat is reverberating in Europe’s corridors of power. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz moved quickly to propose a new European Union fund that will offer state aid for EU companies tempted by the US subsidies to emigrate. But in view of how slowly Europe moves, especially when common debt needs to be issued to finance anything, it is questionable whether the EU subsidies will counter the US subsidies in a timely and proportionate manner.
Germany’s car industry is a good example of what is at stake. Carmakers were dealt a double blow by the return of inflation: rising fuel prices deterred customers and increased

— source yanisvaroufakis.eu | Yanis Varoufakis | 23/01/2023

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Italian police bust Azov-tied Nazi cell planning terror attacks

Italian police announced a series of raids against the neo-Nazi Order of Hagal organization. Accused of stockpiling weapons and planning terror attacks, the group has established operational ties to the Ukrainian Azov Battalion.

Five members of an Italian neo-Nazi organization known as the “Order of Hagal” were arrested on November 15th while an additional member remains wanted by authorities. He happened to be in Ukraine, fighting Russian forces alongside the Azov Battalion, which has been formally integrated into the Ukrainian military.

The “Hagal” members are accused of plotting terrorist attacks on civilian and police targets. A sixth member of the Hagal group, now considered a fugitive, is in Ukraine and

— source thegrayzone.com | Alexander Rubinstein | Nov 15, 2022

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Fascism Returns in Italy

in Italy, where the country’s first far-right leader since Benito Mussolini, Giorgia Meloni, has declared victory, as the right-wing alliance led by her Brothers of Italy party looks set to win a clear majority in the next Parliament. Meloni is also allied with Spain’s far-right Vox party, Poland’s ruling nationalist Law and Justice party, Sweden’s newly formed coalition government led by the anti-immigrant, far-right Sweden Democrats party, which emerged out of Sweden’s neo-Nazi movement. Far-right French politician Marine Le Pen’s party hailed Meloni’s strong showing as a lesson in humility to the European Union. Meloni has vowed to shift the EU’s politics sharply to the right.

The pan-European progressive movement, co-founded by former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, said in a statement on the Italian election, quote, “Italians must now repeat what their ancestors once did: defeat fascism. But not for the return of the politics-as-usual that brought the fascists to power in the first place,” he said.

Meloni is somebody who was a hardcore neofascist, who was in the — at 15, she joined the party that was founded right after Benito Mussolini’s original party was banned in 1945. And this become the fourth-largest party, the neofascist party, called the Italian Social Movement. And she was not only a militant, she became by the ’90s the head of its student organization.

And the flame — if you look at the logo of her party, called Brothers of Italy today, which was founded in 2012, she insisted on keeping a tricolor flame in the logo. And that is

— source democracynow.org | Sep 26, 2022

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EU Pressures

The wording of your question basically answers itself. The European political leaders are unwilling to resist U.S. demands. All they can do is complain at their mistreatment. That has led to a split between German and other European businessmen and the European political parties.

See for instance Politico, November 24, 2022: “Europe accuses US of profiting from war.” “Biden’s green subsidies and taxes that Brussels says unfairly tilt trade away from the EU and threaten to destroy European industries. Despite formal objections from Europe, Washington has so far shown no sign of backing down. … the price Europeans pay is almost four times as high as the same fuel costs in America. Then there’s the likely surge in orders for American-made military kit as European armies run short after sending weapons to Ukraine.”

But even businesses are surrendering, and planning to move to the United States and become American companies. “Businesses are planning new investments in the U.S. or even relocating their existing businesses away from Europe to American factories. Just this week, chemical multinational Solvay announced it is choosing the U.S. over Europe for new

— source michael-hudson.com | Michael Hudson | Dec 1, 2022

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Openly neo-Nazi Ukrainian delegation meets Congress, tours US

This September, a delegation of the Ukrainian neo-Nazi-led Azov movement arrived in the United States, at a time when myth making about the far-right network’s “depoliticization” had reached a fever pitch. By this time, the New York Times had ceased referring to Azov as “openly neo-Nazi,” and was referring to the ultra-nationalist organization as “celebrated.”

Since news broke of Azov’s US tour, more information has come to light about the ultra-nationalist organization’s outreach in the country, including efforts by Azov to reverse Congress’ ban on supplying it with arms and training.

The Azov delegation included three veterans of the regiment formerly holed up in the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol. They were led by Giorgi Kuparashvili, the only fighter not taken prisoner by the Russians.

According to Kuparashvili, a cofounder and instructor of the Azov Regiment, his delegation met over fifty members of Congress, far more than anyone has realized. Among those who

— source mossrobeson.medium.com | Moss Robeson | Oct 5, 2022

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The Return of Fascism in Italy

“The election of the first woman prime minister in a country always represents a break with the past, and that is certainly a good thing,” Hillary Clinton said to an Italian journalist at the Venice International Film Festival earlier this month. She was speaking of Giorgia Meloni, a member of the Chamber of Deputies, who could make history if the Brothers of Italy party does as well as expected in Sunday’s elections.

That would be one sort of break with the past. But Meloni would also represent continuity with Italy’s darkest episode: the interwar dictatorship of Benito Mussolini. As Clinton would surely concede, this is not such a good thing.

If Meloni comes to power at the end of this month, it will be as head of a coalition whose other members—Matteo Salvini’s League and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia—were each once the main force on Italy’s populist right. Brothers of Italy, which was polling at 23 percent earlier this month, has overtaken these more established parties and would

— source theatlantic.com | Ruth Ben-Ghiat | Sep 23, 2022

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Europe’s Energy Crisis

We shouldn’t have electricity markets. It’s an abomination. Think about it, Amy. There can’t be an electricity market, to the extent that in your apartment, in your studio, there is one single wire coming out of the wall carrying electricity. There can’t be a market. It’s an actual monopoly. The only way we could have had a market would be if we had 50 different wires, each belonging to a different company, and we could choose which one we connect our appliances to. But, of course, that would be completely crazy, because we would have 50 grids running through every suburb, through every city, through the land. That would be so inefficient, it would be ridiculous.

So, what we have is not really markets. We have the state that steps in and pretends that it is a market, simulates a market, creating a kind of semblance of competition between producers of electricity and a semblance of competition between, supposedly, retailers of electricity, people who — companies that buy electricity wholesale and then sell it to you individually. But all that is a state creation. It’s, you know, a libertarian’s, right-winger’s nightmare, if you want. It’s a market — it’s a fake market created by the state.

— source democracynow.org | Sep 13, 2022

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The Gruesome Methods of Proving Guilt or Innocence in the Middle Ages

Curiously trial by jury was voluntary in medieval England. However, if you did refuse to stand trial, the authorities would crush you between two heavy stones until you either acquiesced or died. In despotic feudal kingdoms “voluntary” was often about as voluntary as Janice from work’s wedding invitation, whom ironically you also wish you could crush between two heavy stones. More serious crimes such as murder, assault and treason were dealt with in the king’s court. If you ended up here and were found guilty, you could be sure of severe punishment. Murderers were hanged or beheaded. Those convicted of treason were hung, drawn and quartered.

So you don’t lose sleep over it, I should explain that being ‘hanged’ stipulated until dead, whereas to be “hung” meant you would be let down before death. As in “I hanged my cat; now it’s dead” compared to “I hung my cat on the wall, then fed it dinner.” However, being hung was usually far worse than a quick hanging, because the executioner would have a delightful basket of torture lined up for you. Starting with the next step, being “drawn.”

Drawn, unfortunately for the accused, did not mean “like one of your French girls”; it was a ghastlier affair, to put it gently. Although it was at least as comparable to naked

— source lithub.com | Arran Lomas | Aug 12, 2022

Excerpted from Stick a Flag in It: 1,000 Years of Bizarre History from Britain and Beyond

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Roger Waters added to Ukrainian govt-sponsored hit list

I have written about the Ukrainian hit list known as Mirotvorets, or “Peacekeeper,” twice before. The first time was in this article about internet censorship, and the second time was when a 13-year-old Ukrainian girl, Faina Savenkova, was added to the list for publicly speaking out against Kiev’s bloody war on Russian-speaking civilians in the eastern part of Ukraine, a region known as the Donbass.

Screen shot of Faina Savenkova’s profile on Mirotvorets.

Mirotvorets is a database which lists thousands of journalists, activists, and anyone else who is declared an “Enemy of Ukraine.” Their personal information is published, such as the addresses of their homes, their phone numbers and bank account numbers; anything that can help them be easily located. When the people on this list are murdered, like Italian journalist Andrea Rocchelli was, the word ЛИКВИДИРОВАН, “LIQUIDATED,” written in Ukrainian, is stamped across their picture in big red letters.

And, as of August 22, Daria Dugina, who was killed in a car bomb explosion in Moscow on Saturday, appears as “liquidated” on the website, adding more credibility to Russia’s

— source medium.com | Deborah Armstrong | Aug 25, 2022

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