Europe’s anti-austerity popular revolt is not benefitting the political parties of the authentic left that should be reaping electoral support from disaffected workers, pensioners, and students. Instead, the parties of the far-right, which are in lockstep with the corporate-fascist goals of multinational banks and corporations, are gaining in strength.
The parties of the far right stand to upend Europe’s bourgeois supranational infrastructures in favor of a group of nationalist governments that will continue to take their orders from the international mega-corporations and banks that have always been more favorably disposed toward fascist regimes than democratic conservative or even bourgeois socialist governments.
It is ironic that many nations are drifting toward fascism as a result of severe austerity measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and, in the case of Europe, the European Central Bank. The corporate-owned media provides fascist parties like Jobbik in Hungary and Golden Dawn in Greece with massive coverage while actual left-progressive parties like SYRIZA in Greece receive minimal coverage. In fact, SYRIZA’s leader, Alexis Tsipras, was criticized by much of the corporate media for attending the funeral of Venezuela’s socialist president, Hugo Chavez. While the corporate media expresses doubt that Tsipras could ever become a Greek Chavez—a leftist leader willing to kick out NATO once and for all and move Greece into a progressive socialist camp where the ultra-wealthy are forced to give back what they have stolen from the Greek people—the fascist Golden Dawn is given more of a chance of achieving political power. And that would be fine for the tax-avoiding Greek billionaires who have hidden their wealth abroad while Greek workers, pensioners, the disabled, and students have been forced into penury by the dictates from the bankers in Frankfurt, London, Brussels, and Washington.
Although Golden Dawn has espoused anti-Semitic rhetoric, it, like other European fascist parties puts anti-Islamic activism ahead of anti-Semitism and, in so doing, has found common cause with pro-Israeli Islamophobes around Europe and in the United States, Israel, and other Western countries. The confluence of neo-Nazism and Islamophobic movements was seen in the network that Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik participated. The network included pro-Israeli fascists in England, the Netherlands, Poland, and Germany.
Golden Dawn, whose 18 members of the Greek Parliament always garner media attention when they engage in their antics, is more likely to threaten violence against Muslim Turks and Albanians than against Jews.
Golden Dawn’s Hungarian counterpart, Jobbik, or the Movement for a Better Hungary, has elected 43 members in the Hungarian National Assembly. Jobbik claims it is neither left nor right. However, its policies are clearly neo-fascist. Although Jobbik parliamentarians and leaders have often engaged in anti-Semitic publicity stunts, the party is clearly more anti-Roma and anti-Muslim. In fact, one of its leaders, Csanad Szegedi, was discovered to have Jewish roots. Hungarians have no reasonable avenues on the left to express their anger. The Hungarian Socialist Party, the successor to the party that ruled Hungary during communist rule, has become a bourgeois party of the “center-left,” in other words, it has become a playground for the globalist troublemakers and interlocutors of George Soros’s Open Society Institute and its non-governmental organization (NGO) affiliates.
Soros and his allied globalists have always worked closely with the Central Intelligence Agency and the central and supranational bankers to suppress the authentic progressive left and provide an impetus to fascist political parties and movements.
A CIA Directorate of Intelligence report dated December 13, 1983, foresaw the imposition of global austerity on the working class. The report outlined the CIA’s policies, which continue to exist today: “In France and Italy, Socialist-led governments are attempting at least to restrain the further growth of social welfare spending. Conservative and Christian Democratic governments in the United Kingdom, West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark are committed to trimming welfare benefits and reducing the state’s social and economic role.” Why was the CIA so excited about austerity in Western Europe in the 1980s. The CIA report answers that question: social welfare spending was impacting military spending by the NATO nations. And when it comes to guns over butter, the CIA prefers spending on the guns. The CIA was a contrivance of Wall Street and the global bankers and it acts as a global centurion for the interests of the elites.
The CIA report actually contains a section called “National Austerity Programs,” which trumpets West German cuts in family allowances, a change in student grants to loans, delayed pension increases, decrease in the state’s share in unemployment insurance and pension contributions, cuts in unemployment benefits, and a pay freeze for civil servants. The CIA also championed Margaret Thatcher’s policies in the United Kingdom to “reduce the state’s overall economic role.” The CIA praises Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi for higher charges for health care, an increase in the retirement age, and limiting Italy’s “generous” disability program. Craxi, a “socialist,” became a close friend of Italy’s media mogul, Silvio Berlusconi, who himself would become Prime Minister of Italy as a neo-fascist. In 1994, Craxi escaped to Tunisia to avoid a 27-year prison sentence for corruption and he enjoyed the protection of the equally-corrupt Tunisian President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali.
Belgium’s center-right Prime Minister Wilfried Martens was commended by the economists of Langley for his “crisis” austerity program that cut real wages in the public and private sectors and spending on social security, education, and unemployment insurance. Dutch Prime Minister Rudd Lubbers was praised for freezing social security benefits, trimming social welfare benefits, and reducing the government’s share of pension contributions. Danish Prime Minister Poul Schlueter was lauded for toughening criteria for unemployment compensation and public assistance and reductions in government subsidies to non-profit housing.
The CIA was alarmed that opinion polls in Western Europe showed that most people, including those who identified themselves as conservative, were opposed to social welfare cuts and increases in defense spending. As the Cold War ended, the CIA and the forces of global capitalism and suppression of the working class would find a new enemy to replace the Communist bloc: international terrorism. Social welfare spending cuts remained high on the globalists’ chopping blocks.
Today, President Barack Obama has adopted the Republican right-wing’s desire to slash government spending on the three pillars of the traditional Democratic Party’s social safety net program: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Obama has proven, once again, that he is the multiracial and politically-engineered product of the CIA’s “creative leadership” recruitment program of the 1970s and 80s. As a racial minority Democratic president, Obama is clearly in a position to eradicate the social welfare programs of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson that no white president, Democratic or Republican, could carry out successfully. Obama has, therefore, fulfilled the desires of the international elites that were identified over two decades ago.
Other CIA economic reports closely followed the IMF-imposed austerity programs around the world. The CIA was more concerned about IMF-dictates compliance by Argentina, the Philippines, Chile, Mexico, Portugal, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Dominican Republic, Turkey, Morocco, Algeria, Senegal, and Brazil than in the effects the austerity programs had on the middle class and poor. Even the communist countries of Yugoslavia, Romania, East Germany, and Hungary were targeted for austerity with a view their state economies would soon come crashing down. On CIA documents are the names of the architects of the shakedown of the world’s working class: Paul Wolfowitz, Leo Cherne, Morton Abramowitz, Michael Armacost, Alan Greenspan, and members of the Federal Reserve Board: a virtual cesspool of neo-conservatives and globalists.
The progressive left in Europe, the United States, and other nations now stands against the coordinated efforts of the globalist super-entities of the banks, IMF, World Bank, European Union, Pentagon, CIA, NATO, and the other centurions of the ultra-wealthy. For many people who have simply nowhere to go to vent their spleens, the left has either been compromised, co-opted, or emaciated and the far-right stands ready to sound the clarion call, not for the interests of the masses but for the bottom line of the global capitalists.
This article originally appeared in Strategic Culture Foundation on-line journal.
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
