Well, yes, try to impose nationalist or protectionist policies in any EU country and watch yourself and your family get GLADIO'd out of existence extra pronto.
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It's not just about that. Most of your rulers desperately believe in neoliberalism. They mostly aren't being forced to be internationalist technocratic neoliberal assholes, it's their religion (there are exceptions, but they are exceptions.)
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Yes, but, this is just people being products of their environment.
Elites are carefully cultivated for ideological consistency. Exceptions are pruned, mercilessly.
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In the old Chomskian sense of manufactured consent, they would not be around to be "leaders" if they weren't of a certain spineless disposition.
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sure, but that no longer requires things like Gladio. It's self imposed, and not done so out of fear but of belief.
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All I see in this is the success of the program.
You get to Corbyn being ratted out by his own party through years, decades, of removing every single effectual person from power.
When all that's left is careerist cowards and softies, control can take on forms less overt.
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If there were a European revival in the sense of strength of belief, nationalism (or regionalism), etc., you can bet we'd see the return of annual mysterious deaths among prominent politicians.
Market forces, innit?
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Europe is powerful enough to stop that, if they were serious. It's time to stop pretending you HAVE to bow down to America. At this point, it's a choice.
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which your leaders just made again, by the way. The EU response to Ukraine was to crawl spinelessly to America and beg to be ruled and impoverished.
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though, I'm mostly arguing for the hell of it. The difference between our position is about 3 hairs. I'm just tired of Europeans acting as if they have no other choices. America isn't that powerful any more. It's not 1950 or 2000.
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There would indeed be choices if people had the constitutions necessary to make them.
"You are the weak men of these times," and all that.
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Russia just bucked both the US and Europe and didn't back down. I think Ukrainians are being idiots, but no one can say they don't have spines.
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