Lead for the Wolf

Half of them. Adults and pups and family groups, either way, slay half of them. Every other brother, every other sister, and every other parent. Even a decimation of a population only terminates a tenth. No, that’s not enough, not by far. We are to levy death on the scale of the bubonic plague. Which is our right by might.

Not even the Angel of Death was so voracious…

The Government of Sweden, it matters not whether left or right, wants fewer wolves in the country. They (and their paymasters the Hunting Lobby) have wanted that for the past twenty years, butting heads with the European Union over the Habitat Directive on multiple occasions. And now, with a fresh faced right-wing, brown-shirt supported, government, Sweden raises its nose at humanity’s oldest companion and lays down indiscriminate judgement. Whole packs are to be wiped out at an unprecedented scale this year. 75 wolves out of a population of 460 are on the wanted list. That’s more than a third the amount that have been hunted and killed over the past 12 years.

While the government preservation agency requires at least, AT LEAST, 300 individual wolves minimum for a healthy population, the government plans to reduce the population to between 170 and 270 over the coming years. That in comparison to the over 10 million people living in the country.

But the wolf debate is divisive, and isn’t even focused on how many wolves should be allowed to roam the wilds, but rather whether they deserves to exist at all.

“Personally I don’t think we should have a wolf population in the country at all”, the brown-shirt politician Magnus Persson (SD) ruminates to the national news broadcaster. “There was a reason we eliminated the wolf completely once upon a time”; the reason referred to being religious prosecution and vilification because of humanity’s inability to tolerate any natural competition to our god-given dominion.

Personally, I don’t think we need supremacists in the country at all, or anywhere in the world come to think of it, but I digress…

But morality aside (as if it’s in any way shape or form okay to set that aside for practical concerns) the wolf causes damages, doesn’t it? It’s a dangerous predator, isn’t it? Wolves have killed people, haven’t they? In 2012, an experienced animal handler at the Swedish zoo Kolmården was killed under mysterious circumstances by the resident wolf pack. Other than that; no. Wolves just plain don’t kill people. Domesticated dogs fall somewhere in the category of confused competition in the eyes and olfactory senses of wolves, and during 2021, 11 dogs were reported killed (most of which were running off the leash in wolf-populated forests, which sounds like an incredible privileged idea). That same year, 286 sheep were also reported killed by wolves across the country, compared to the total sheep population of 250’000 (excluding lambs for some reason, probably because we kill them ourselves on a yearly basis). Most importantly, if we’re to listen to our god The Free Market, 2021 saw 1.7 million euro awarded in wolf-related damages.

It is difficult for me to write a summation of my utter disgust for the urge to murder wolves, not for meat, but for jealousy and fear. Which is probably why the debate stays so vitriolic across the span of decades. To me, an ardent environmentalist and misanthrope, the preservation of natural habitats (of which apex predators are a fundamental part) is a human obligation. To the Other, to the economist and the hunter and the farmer and the privileged pet owner living the nightmare-adjacent dream of a cabin in the woods, the wolf represents a hindrance in our righteous exploitation of natural resources. To them, the forests and all the beasts within exist for our pleasure, for our benefit, in accordance to the scripture of our jealous Jehovah. To me, that dribble of cognitive sewage stinks of supremacy: A notion that humans and human desires stand supreme to any other consideration, even the preservation of the needs of generations yet to come.

It’s egocentrism, in the purest form. Vile, religiously imprinted, free market-fuelled and unchecked egocentrism. Anything that endangers or threatens the almighty “I” shall be exterminated. No mention of the fact that humans really don’t need to take up all the space they do, no mention that you don’t have to live close to nature if they find it dangerous or simply scary, no mention that for all the land humanity lays unjust claim to a yearly sacrifice of a few hundred sheep is not that steep a rent.

I do not know what fundamental switch differs between the two, me and The Other. Obviously there’s a schism in how we view the world and humanity’s place in it. But I have as of yet to find what argument to voice, what little foundational stone to shift, to turn supremacy to acceptance. To shift egocentrism to humility. To make people remember that it was not that long ago that both man and wolf were Beloved of the Moon. There must be something, back in the corner of the human mind, that gives rise to such disparity. It is easy to wield words like “privilege” or “intelligence”, or even “religion”, as cudgels in this rhetoric fight. But those can at best be associations; not causes.

I do not know how to properly express my despair and resentment at how cruelly my government and my neighbours delivers disdainful death to our once but never again colleagues of the hunt. If I did, if we did, this debate would be at an end. And until I do, until I find that golden postulate to whither the brambles of egocentrism, estranged sibling will keep slaying estranged sibling like a black death upon both houses. And until I do, I shall keep up my lament.

/Sebastian Lindberg 3/1-2023

The Great Pipeline Whodunnit

Since Monday, the sea off the coast of Sweden has been churning. Coughing gas and regurgitating methane in a gaseous maelstrom. The Nord Stream pipelines, Russia’s great gas artery to the EU, are broken, and expunging its greenhouse gas through a hundred meters of ocean.

And everyone, Russia included, agrees that the rupture is no accident, natural or otherwise, but a deliberate demolition. And accusations, as always, are flying higher than greenhouse gases ever could.

Which leads us to the question of who would do such a thing…

As far as environmental disasters go, this isn’t that big a deal. A pipeline-full of methane gas isn’t great, but since it’d be burnt anyway, it’s really all the same. The ocean won’t even necessarily be terribly contaminated, since plenty of marine biology eat methane, quite literally, for breakfast. So, rationally, technically, the demolitions of the Nord Stream pipeline could be to the benefit of the environment, seeing as the sudden pollution can’t hold a candle to the pollution produced if the pipelines were to operate normally over a long period of time. But since no environmental organization has stepped forward to take responsibility, not to mention the fact that the sabotage seems to have been an expertly performed and difficult dive and execution, it seems unlikely that tree-huggers or motorway obstructionists could pull it off.

Which leaves us with state actors. Naturally, most of our suspicious eyes turned toward Russia in the wake of the rupture. Who vehemently refute any such suspicions (which tells us absolutely nothing) and instead turn the lime light toward the US. And the other EU countries around the Baltic aren’t in the habit of blowing up fuel pipelines in their backyards.

Yet, it seems reasonable to believe that the pipeline demolition is part of the Ukraine war. Russia has previously leveraged European dependencies on its gas as a diplomatic chip against the EU’s support for Ukraine. Throughout summer and early autumn, Russian gas pipeline operator Gazprom has cut back on gas delivery through Nord Stream. Ostensibly to perform maintenance.

And say what you will about Putin’s gambit to invade Ukraine being a dumbass move. But he is otherwise not known to be a dumb strategist. And the Nord Stream pipeline was a big bargaining card for him in his negotiations with the EU to stop supporting Ukraine. With winter looming, that diplomatic card would only grow.

And now, that bargaining chip is gone, ripped from Putin’s hands by some enterprising saboteur.

The loss of Nord Stream weakens Putin’s influence in “the West”, because it is now out of his hands to turn the gas on or off for a freezing Europe. Which makes me think it would not be the neo-imperialist’s hand on the button this time, but rather someone wanting to undermine his position.

Sure; it could be the US. But the US aren’t known for subtlety. And though they’ve been opposed to the EU’s Russian gas dependency, why would they bomb the pipelines now that the gas delivery is already on hold? Instead, it seems to me, more likely that the sabotage comes from the east; not the west.

Ukraine has proven resourceful in their war against Russian aggression. They’ve been given enough guns and bombs and western equipment to withstand against, bloody the nose of, and break the Russian advance. And whatever bargaining power Russia has with the West seems to me to look like a potential death threat to Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.

But even more likely, I find, is that Putin’s house at the Kremlin is full of snakes. Putin’s paranoid behaviour during the invasion tells us as much; that he fears his own as much as the other. His draconic authoritarianism against opposition tells us the same story. It is almost as if he knows, damned well, that his reign will end from within and not from without. And now that his war is turning from a week-long field trip to a losing slog, Putin looks weak. Perhaps for the first time in thirty years. And he has bred a house of beasts, oligarchs eager to slice the throat of the slipping Tsar…

Would it be so unthinkable that Nord Stream exploded at the command of one such opportunist? Disappointed with their supreme emperor, disillusioned with Putin’s play for power, dispirited with this evil war of annexation.

Maybe, just maybe, Russia was behind the rupture. Just not Putin’s Russia.

/Sebastian Lindberg 3/10-2022

The Saddest Triumph

Macron won. Beating the nationalistic baguette-Trump Le Pen by an okay but underwhelming margin. Which means that France will march on to the tune of discordant climate conscious neo-liberalism for another turn of the polls. A win that makes for the saddest kind of triumph we can expect under the current political climate.

An explanation is in order…

Le Pen, to my mind, represents two things. On one hand; the worst possible brand of disgruntled populism, racism, nationalism, protectionism, tribalism, and a reversion back to an imperial dream that has drowned the world in blood more than once. The end to globalism and to the dream of human unity required to reign in human destruction. A mass extinction through fear and anger. And on the other hand; Le Pen represents deserved distrust of a status quo that has done nothing but downtrod the downtrodden, disenfranchise the franchiseless, enrich the rich, and move forward the doomsday clock.

Nationalist extremist democratic parties have again and again been a death knell to liberal democracies. And quite frankly, I don’t think the world has the constitution for another 20^th century-style conflagration.

It is a good thing for the state of the world that Le Pen lost. Which is why it’s so sad that for her to do so, a neo-liberal centrist had to win.

I admit that I know little of Macron’s domestic policies. But I, like the rest of the world’s electorate and elected, watched with horror at the Gilets Jaune rebellion; sparked by distress over raised petroleum prices. Price hikes that are the only incentive we have available to us in a capitalist society to stop the proliferation of the systemic, ecological toxin that is oil. I know that Macron, regardless of domestic policies, was one of the most outspoken proponents of the Paris Agreement. I also know that while he talks the talk, he can’t, or won’t, quite walk the walk. The Gilets Jaune disappointment remains his greatest achievement and at the same time his most pathetic failure on that front. And there is no reason to hope he’ll try anything as ambitious again.

Which is why Macron’s win over Le Pen is sad. Most definitely not because it would have been better if Le Pen won, oh heavens no! But because the best option available to voters to oppose far-right nationalism, protectionism, hate, and a step backwards for sustainability, is environmentalist failure.

A public in a crisis, at the culmination of a mass extinction pushed by short-sighted capitalism and greed, need better choices than denial or failure. Not just in France, not just in Europe, but everywhere. The survival of our civilization, of hotdogs and art and freedom of speech and sunny days under green canopies, will not be ensured by revolutions of hate, nor by a steady heading onward for investment banks and stock markets.

People deserve better choices.

Wait, no! No… that’s ass-backwards, ‘innit? People do not deserve better choices. People make their choices. No amount of media manipulation or propaganda or threats can take away the choice itself. Deserving or not has nothing to do with it. Let’s try this instead:

Humanity deserves better choices.

/Sebastian Lindberg 26/4-2022

Bargain Bin Espionage

Chinese sec-tech-company Nuctech wins the bid to modernize the largest airport in Sweden. A tidbit story that snuck in under the European radar among warnings of western storms and eastern wars. And to be fair, on the surface it is nothing revolutionary about it. Apparently, Nuctech operates in just about every single EU country, running security for sea- and airports both.

If one is inclined to make a stink out of this project acquisition, one should be mindful of the inherent sinophobia. In an article in AP, questions arise about the fiscal independence and motivations of Nuctech’s European front. Their capacity to out-perform and price-drop their competitors into obsolescence not least of which. But despite Nuctech EU CEO’s reassurances, the tangled web between Chinese corporate and government interests keeps turning out to be less of a tangle and more of a CCP stranglehold. If the Party says “jump”, investors, innovators and corporate moguls can’t leap into the air fast enough to avoid disappearing into a black bag.

And let us not forget how tech companies world wide love to exploit the data their technologies accumulate. Facebook got caught holding the bag for political manipulation in two of the western world’s most embarrassing shows of democratic failure in modern times. The collection, repackaging, and distribution of Big Data is perhaps the biggest ghost market in the world. Despite the fact that it spawned as a conspiracy theory, it is so very, very, very easy to believe that all those cute face filters you love to toy with inform and develop digitalized police states. And as we learn from the onslaught of free social media apps with their face filters and algorithms, if a product is presented to you as free or ridiculously cheap then you are the product.

But even if suspicion born out of mounting evidence is prudent, suspicion run amok breeds prejudice.

Back to the matter at hand, Sweden has a long (and sordid) history of streamlining project acquisitions and sales, founded around a set of laws intended to make sure that the “best offer” wins and keep prejudice and nepotism away from company dealings. Essentially, mechanics to limit corruption. Which, y’know, is good in theory…

Good until it became a matter of “best offer” equating to the “cheapest offer”, a misconception bred from incompetence and its own form of corruption. And when the cheapest offer is somewhere between 30 and 50 percent lower than your next competitor, a fair dose of scepticism seems warranted to anyone that isn’t a Scroogey fucking twat and solely concerned with rubbing monies together. Because when a deal is too good to be true, it ever so often isn’t. Time and time again we witness construction companies, technical consultation firms, infrastructure management conglomerates, fail in their victories to supply or perform in accordance with their bids.

And somewhere down here beneath all the what-ifs and anecdotes and disjointed facts, we’re supposed to find a bottom line. A line upon which we are supposed to believe that a foreign company hogtied by an authoritarian political juggernaut can supply public security services, of both inconceivably higher quality and lower cost than competitors, that will not aid and abet a police state elsewhere but also safeguard public liberties locally, and not ever pose a military security threat in an increasingly destabilizing world in which the aforementioned authoritarian political juggernaut seems eager to step in and seize influence and power. ‘Cause that’s a big line. Gnarly hook. Hefty sinker.

/Sebastian Lindberg 22/2-2022

An Ill Intended Blessing

Imagine a world without Facebook. Imagine a world without Instagram. Imagine a world where it may be a bit more cumbersome to get friends together, but where your social life wasn’t harvested for click-bait fodder and Bannon-esue efforts to destabilize the union. Imagine it, because Zuckerberg just threatened us with it.

In a clumsily formulated warning in its latest annual report, Meta (the new found Zuckerberg umbrella corporation) suggested that it might shut down Facebook and Instagram all across the European Union. Just like that, with a snap of his humanoid digits. Leaving millions of Europeans stranded without the capacity to envy their neighbours’ vacation pictures.

But why would the draconian Big Data giant bless us so? Well, because the European Union has had enough with Facebook’s peddling and meddling. And as of July 2020, with basis in the the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) from 2016, the European Court of Justice ruled that EU citizen private data won’t be adequately protected in the US. In short; the EU consider the US to be a dystopian surveillance state and won’t have them oogling Europeans hither and dither any longer.

And turns out that Facebook can’t (or won’t) do business unless they spy on their users and are allowed to sell their personal data to the highest bidder. Go figure. But they wouldn’t do that? Right? Zuckerberg wouldn’t gorge himself on the stolen integrity of his users by supplying it to government agencies and Machiavellian political interests, would he? Meta, and its Facebook and Instagram tendrils, wouldn’t do us dirty like that, would they?

Well, yes, they would. And they have. Facebook sold the private information of millions of users to feed the Ted Cruz and Donald Trump campaigns of 2016. One might even say that Facebook single-handedly put Donnie on the US throne. That same year, Facebook sold data to Cambridge Analytica, a political advisory company that was (or was not) hired by the Brexiteers of the former European Union province of the United Kingdom. And just last year, the US Congress demanded that Zuckerberg come and testify after the whistleblower Frances Haugen told the world that Facebook feeds on hate and fear.

It is as certain as the implosion of real estate bubbles that Facebook and Instagram will harvest and sell your personal data for their fiscal benefit and your societal downfall. They have done it, they’ve never shown remorse for it, and thus; they will do it again.

If they can’t function without social life vampirism, then I think it’s fair to say that they’re a vicious boil upon society and should do us all a favour and shut down their services. Maybe we’d be better off without them. Maybe populists will have a harder time spreading disinformation and fear. Maybe I won’t have to envy the look of beaches at sunset that I’ll never get to visit. And maybe the return of phone books isn’t such a high price to pay for the exorcism of the hate-goblin Zuckerberg.

/Sebastian Lindberg 8/2-2022

A War Begotten; A War Forgotten

War. It’s what’s been on everyone’s lips this week. War in Europe. A new blisteringly hot Cold One. Or maybe the beginning of a new cataclysmic one. War, war, war, and who’s to blame for it.

Western media is stoked with Russian fears. Imperialist expansionism, disregard for the sanctity of the sovereign state, worries of the reliance on Russian gas. And that’s not even taking into account the US narrative…

Lacking a better enemy than its own self, the US has been manic in vilifying Russia for years. And every modern president to date, paradoxically apart from the Trump, has bolstered faltering domestic popularity by starting wars. Drumming up a new war, on foreign soil, for short-term domestic political gains, is absolutely in keeping with their modus operandi.

Meanwhile, the Putin Doctrine has had Russia rattle its sabres across their Soviet-days stomping grounds relentlessly for years. From fighter-jet fly-bys across the Baltic Sea, to invasions into Georgia and assassinations (attempts and successes both) inside the European Union. Not to mention aggressive propaganda campaigns through internationally aimed news agencies, such as RT. And now the military build up along the Ukraine-Russia border. A mustering that the Russian media machine dismiss as self-defensive and totes not at all aggressive and threatening so long as Ukraine comes back to the post-Soviet fold and cease its dreams of self-determination and EU partnership.

Everyone seems to forget, though, that Russia’s war on Ukraine started eight years ago when they annexed Crimea and created splinter vassal states in the east of Ukraine. That war never ended. Never stopped. And has, as of May 2021, cost some 14’000 lives.

What we’re seeing today, what media outlets worry is the start of a war in Europe, is in actuality the escalation of an already running one. It is the opening of a new front. The question isn’t whether or not Russia will invade. They already did. The question isn’t whether Russia’s prepared to commit troops to subjugate Ukraine. They’re already doing it. The question isn’t even what the west, what Nato or the EU or the USA, will do about it. Because they’ve already shown that the answer is “pretty much not a god damned thing” except thoughts and prayers with some gifts of guns and bombs on top.

What’s the question then? Depends on the colour of your curiosity, I s’pose. I’m curious as to why the 24-hour news media cycle has the memory and perspective of goldfish. I’m curious how far Putin is prepared to go to reforge the Soviet Union under a neo-imperial Russia. I’m curious as to when the EU will stop hinging its security situation on the yoke of US domestic politics.

But I am most certainly not curious about whether or not there will or will not be a war in Ukraine. Because that’s already the case. Has been for years.

/Sebastian Lindberg 1/2-2022

The Iron Curtain 2.0

We are seeing the birth of a new Iron Curtain on the eastern border of the EU. In an inverted kind of way. Fortifying along the edge of the Belarusian border in Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. And along that line of demarcation, people are dying.

By now, I believe most of us have seen videos and pictures from the Polish-Belarusian border, where Minsk-sponsored refugees try desperately to negotiate freezing temperatures, barbed wire, tear gas, Polish military and border patrols. All for a Belarusian promise of safe conduct to Germany. Horrifying feeds engineered to tug at our heart strings.

As with any manipulative publicity stunt and aggressive ass-hattery, there’re plenty of sides on show. The EU, and the US by proxy, blame Belarus’ Lukashenko and his puppetmaster Putin for taking a play from the Erdogan playbook and engineer the catastrophe. Belarusian state media drag the EU’s response, Poland’s in particular, through the mud, and call out the Union for it’s humanitarian hypocrisy. According to the few witness accounts extracted from the militarised border, there are stories about Belarusian military police abuse, lies, violence, drug dosing, stealing identification papers and passports and money, and plain cattle herding. Meanwhile, among the human traffickers from Istanbul that profiteer from desperate refugees by sending them on to Lukashenko’s cynical hybrid war gambit, we find absolutely zero sympathy or expressed responsibility for the crisis.

And in the freezing winter woods of Białowieża, people freeze to death.

And the more you read about the crisis, the harder it gets to take sides in it. Theories abound that Lukashenko is trying to force a military crisis that would require Russia to properly occupy Belarus, and thus cement his own power in the country against its population. Poland, with its increasing politicised xenophobia, homophobia, islamophobia and just general populist phobia-centric government, is a real low hanging fruit to be made to look corrupt, fascist, and cruel. And to be fair, colonial EU can easily be traced back to pretty much every refugee crisis in the world, which begs criticism of its privileged and exclusive view of humanitarianism. Likewise, there’s plenty of responsibility to levy against the regimes in the over-represented nationalities massing along the borders. Not to mention the human traffickers, whether motivated by misguided sympathy or callous greed, who seem incapable or unwilling to accept any responsibility for the deaths they actively cause or directly influence.

Absolutely no one involved in this failure of diplomacy, this international fiasco, looks good. It smells of Belarusian desperation and cynicism. Russian machiavellian manipulation. Polish fascism. EU moral corruption. The failure of state in the Middle East. All of which has caught thousands of desperate people in the middle. People who’re so desperate that they’ll believe some fairytale of some fabled northern utopia to escape their misery.

It all stinks of desperation. Every single side of it. Desperation not to lose what little or what plenty that you have. Accumulating in a twisted bramble of madness that absolutely no one will benefit from. The sort of desperate madness that breeds world war, come to think of it…

/Sebastian Lindberg 16/11-2021

The Ryanair Affront

Last weekend, the Belarusian dictator Lukashenko buckled down hard on his quest to become the most despicable strongman this side of the Urals. With the courtesy of an armed MiG-29, a Lithuania-bound Ryanair flight was diverted over Belarusian airspace, on the dictator’s direct orders, just so that he could nab the dissident journalist Raman Pratasyevich. Potentially, according to the Belarusian opposition, so that Lukashenko could execute him.

In short; a foreign dictator forced a European airline to breach their contract of confidence with their passengers, giving one of them up at the muzzle of a loaded air-to-air missile lock.

At first, Ryanair played down their gross dereliction of responsibility with a white-washed PR statement that completely neglected to mention the kidnapping of Raman on their watch. But then, as eye witness accounts began to pour forth from other passengers that were spared the Ryanair betrayal, indignation became the popular response. Indignation spreading across the EU like a political wildfire.

EU countries have recommended that airlines avoid Belarusian airspace altogether. Impotent condemnation come hailing in across the Belarusian regime. Meanwhile, Lukashenko hits back with Turkish threats of opening borders to migrants and drug-trafficking. And as an Austrian airline tries to avoid Belarusian airspace on its trip to Moscow, Russia steps in and defends its wee brother’s integrity and revokes the new flight plan.

Meanwhile, the world asks, how can we allow such an affront to occur? Not that it’s a new one. The US had foreign nationals stashed away under military lock and key for decades. Nor shall we ever forget the Swedish book publisher Gui Minhai that was kidnapped by Chinese secret police in 2015 and has yet to be returned to his family. This sort of shit happens regularly.

Why? Because the “civilized world” has de-fanged itself. Lukashenko will get away with this. Because Europe has turned itself into a war-exporter, without muscles of its own to dare and oppose its ornery neighbours. Europe has collectively turned into a spoilt boomer who counters violent affronts by threats of a wallet-whooping.

War is a filthy human practise. Young men and women dying for the benefit of a ruling elite. But there have been wars that warranted a fight. Nearly a century hence, Europe faced such a war. A war against a belligerent bully, poised to brow-beat every single one of its neighbours into an ethnically cleansed blurr. The Second World War stands not only as a testament to the horrors of war, but also that sometimes, just sometimes, there are fights worth having. And when the younger brother of the neighbourhood monster family starts waylaying your transports, kidnapping your friends, annexing your back yard, and beating their chests that you’re too weak to stop them, then it’s no time to merely meekly bark back that you’re not going to share your ice cream with them any more.

A bully only bullies as far as they can do so unopposed. And they will keep pushing that border until they encounter resistance. With every successive atrocity, the bully grows bolder, and you grow weaker. And if you do not resist, the bully will cut away at you until eventually there’s nothing left to mount any resistance with at all.

Because waging your wallet against a warplane just doesn’t cut it. Instead, it may be time to start letting those fangs grow out again…

/Sebastian Lindberg 1/6-2021

The Troyan Horse from Cyprus

The European Union is finding it problematic to bare its teeth at the Belarusian government, following the violent clamp-downs on the pro-democracy demonstrations and protests rocking the Cold War-dictatorship. Why? Because, in the middle of a authoritarian panic attack, the member state Cyprus won’t have it.

Having a hard time to pin the needle on the donkey’s arse on this one? Sure, it’s international diplomatic intrigue; of course it’s a mess. So, let’s play clue…

What we have are five players. Belarus, Russia, the EU, Cyprus, and Turkey. Turkey’s kind of off to the side, playing its own games, but they still have an impact on our board.

The Belarus elections turn poorly for the reigning dictator Lukashenko. He’s been ruling for twenty years, and is not-very-lovingly referred to as Europe’s Last Dictator. I guess Europe isn’t counting Russia’s Putin, but we’ll get to him eventually. But as for the election, for the first time in twenty years, the population of Belarus won’t have it any more. They protest, they rebel, and Lukashenko is finding it harder and harder to hold onto power.

So up Lukashenko goes to big-brother Russia. Analysts have for years speculated that Russia is interested in slowly and peacefully gobbling up the old Warsaw Pact nation of Belarus. To put it properly back into the fold of the Russian Empire. But they’re reluctant to bet their chips on a failing autocrat like Lukashenko. Best scenario for the Kremlin would be a more successful autocrat, but that can be hard to find on a moment’s notice.

Meanwhile, in the European Union, the parliament sees a chance to rid the continent of an autocrat, and perhaps manage to install a proper democracy in Belarus. Maybe push back Russian interests a bit. A win-win opportunity, they consider it. Russia has been pressuring the EU for years. Like for example; the Russian funded news network RT, which was prolific in stoking the Gilets Jaune debacle. Or let’s say the provocative military flybys around the Baltic Sea. Or how Russia has been accused of disseminating disinformation about Covid-19 to rattle the EU. Russia is pushing. And it would be nice to get to push back. The EU thus set up a plan. To start imposing sanctions on Belarusian leadership and key figures. To make a non-military stand. To put pressure on the regime. To give the Belarusian protestors and the pro-democracy movement some wind in their sails.

But those EU sanctions have hit a snag. And that snag is our fourth player; Cyprus. Cyprus who is currently involved in a tug-of-war with the European-Middle Eastern nation of Turkey, and that country’s strongman autocrat, Erdogan. Turkey has been playing every side of the global political stage since World War the Second. Sometimes swinging the EU way, sometimes the US direction, but as of the past few years, it has squarely been swinging towards Russia. And the EU doesn’t quite know what to do with dictatorial, incoherent, and increasingly fundamentalist Turkey. But Cyprus wants to leverage the EU’s Belarusian interests to set the EU into action against Turkey’s Mediterranean aggression. Something the EU is wary of doing, in fear of entrenching Turkey further and further in the Russian camp.

But that’s potentially not Cyprus’ only intention. During the summer of 2020, Al Jazeera published an exposé on Cyprus’ business of selling passports to whoever has about 2.5 million USD to spare. People who are criminals, or political refugees, or people close to political power in some of the world’s most corrupt and imperialistic nations. Turns out that around 40% of the people who’ve bought these Golden Passports from Cyprus, these tickets into anywhere in the European Union, have been Russian nationals. Some of them criminal. Others fleeing political persecution. And others just Russian political figures that desire unrestricted travel. And it is not difficult to imagine that such a well-funded elite in the EU nation of Cyprus, with proven corrupt ties to the Cypriot government, may have some sway in how that nation handles its affairs. Why just be corrupt and power-hungry in their native nations when they can be corrupt and power-hungry within the European Union too?

Are you beginning to see the implications? How Russia may be using billionaires and rogue business leaders, through the corruption of the member nation Cyprus, to influence the European Union’s ability to strike back at Russian influence. How Cyprus’ threat to veto sanctions against the Belarusian dictatorial regime potentially serves as a potent fifth column in a new Cold War. And how difficult it is to act all tough and cool when every move in your arsenal is decided by committee, in a world where you have to stand up to autocratic pressure.

/Sebastian Lindberg 22/9-2020

A Scattered Europe, With a Risk of Rain

It came. It went. And it splintered. Just like democracy is want to do. The European Parliament election results are coming in like a sobering hailstorm across Europe. And it is a mixed wind that carries the storm of media coverage.

It is easy to feel discomforted by the results. Italy’s neo-fascist Lega basically won their elections by a land-slide. Marine Le Pen and her own nationalist party in France also made head-way, beating the beleaguered Macron in the polls. And in the UK, the Brexiteers and the political hobgoblin Nigel Farage won, despite that the nation stands on the brink of being punted out of the Union all together.

Seems frustrating, no? I bet the Orange Hydra and his implanted anti-EU lobbyist Bannon must be wringing their hands in glee. So would Putin and Jinping, no doubt. And for us others, eager to see a strong Europe so that we shan’t be divided and torn asunder between the three hungry super-powers, eager to see a strong voice on the global stage that at least tries to make headway toward sustainability, we’re still shitting bricks.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Sure, the big populist, nationalist names have moved ahead. Salvini, Le Pen and Farage have secured dangerous representation. It’s not great. But if you tally the European Parliament, and the sub-groups within, there are plenty of silver linings. Liberals and Greens were actually the big winners in the election, gaining some sixty seats between them in a house of 751 chairs to be filled. That’s not nothing.

And even though UK’s Brexiteers won big, so did the Liberal Democrats, who are staunchly Stayers. In right-wing Hungary, the dictator-wannabe Orban, sadly did well in his country’s election. But so did new voices. Like those of relatively liberal Momentum, who brand themselves as a newer, younger voice for Hungarian politics.

Look, we all know that things are shit. And getting shittier. The planet’s broiling. We’re gorging ourselves on what precious few resources we have. Hate and fear rules the minds of the populace. Populist pricks exploit it to gain temporary benefits. But there’s a flip side. There always is. Just as there’s a flip side to openness and cooperation in protectionism and nationalism, there’s a flip side to the face of Europe that we’re seeing today. And that flip side are new voices. New ideas. New approaches to politics and rhetoric. In the US, we see it in the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In Europe, we see it in the young women and men that push back against Hungary’s autocratic tendencies. We see it in the gains of seats for environmental and liberal voices.

Will it be enough though? Will more Green voices in the European Parliament make it so that political environmentalists will start focusing on redirecting our society toward not only sustainability but also allowing a healthy and abundant biosphere, instead of wanting to pave the entire continent in solar cells? With more Liberals, will they not only strive toward civil liberties and freedoms, but also start to question the frenzied market structure that mindlessly focuses on exponential growth, much like a devouring locust swarm?

To tell you the truth, I don’t know. I really don’t. If we could have done something more for ourselves and our biosphere, we would have by now. But you know what? Even though I would love for humanity to get its shit together and stave off the sixth mass-extinction that’s largely occurring due to our behaviour, I’m not optimistic. But what I am certain about is that I’d much rather die in a world with misguided optimism about the sustainable impact of electric bicycles and the power of the free market than I would in a dystopian hellscape riddled with remnant nation states warring for whatever scant resources are left. Because wouldn’t that be nice?

/Sebastian Lindberg 28/5-2019