Turkish residents in the Netherlands waving Turkey’s national flags (Photo: Getty Images)
Where is the increasingly vituperative spat between Turkey and The Netherlands (and other EU countries) going to lead? Why is this political fall-out between fellow NATO members happening at this precise moment?
By Neil Clark
It’s certainly interesting to note how the Western party line on Erdogan seems to harden whenever Turkish and Russian leaders get together to discuss closer economic/military co-operation (as they did in Moscow only last week), and how, conversely, democratic concerns seem to evaporate when Ankara is at loggerheads with the Kremlin. Erdogan’s pledge to support Syria’s territorial integrity, and his opposition to the country being Balkanized would not have gone down well with those who want to see the Arab Republic cut up into little pieces.
Even though he doesn’t mention Turkey explicitly in his new book, ‘The New World Order in Action, Globalization, the Brexit Revolution and the Left,’ the Greek left-wing writer Takis Fotopoulos helps us to understand very clearly what’s going on. His thesis is that the transnational elite, which consists of a network of economic and political elites mainly based in the G7 countries and acting in the interest of transnational corporations and global capital, have as their aim the full integration of every country in the world into the neo-liberal New World Order. Any countries which resist this integration – e.g., Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, or Syria – are targeted for regime change or destruction.
Turkey is partially integrated, as a member of NATO, but is still something of a loose canon. The promise of EU membership, in return for other favors such as restricting the flow of refugees into Europe, is held out as a carrot to keep Ankara on the straight and narrow.
But there’s a snag that’s as large as one of the minarets of the Blue Mosque. The transnational elite support liberal immigration policies and ‘free movement’ of people in EU countries. That’s not because they’re peace-loving, Blue Mink-playing hippies, in favor of the international brotherhood of man, but because of the downward effect on wages (and the consequent upwards impact on profits) that large-scale immigration leads to in an era of weakened trade unions.
However, public opinion in countries ruled by the transnational elite has, at a time of austerity and considerable economic hardship, turned sharply against liberal immigration policies, with voters increasingly attracted to neo-nationalist parties of the populist right, some of whom espouse Islamophobic sentiments quite openly.
The bottom line is that political leaders/potential leaders backed by the transnational elite, such as Mark Rutte in The Netherlands, Merkel in Germany and Emmanuel Macron in France, face stiff challenges from the likes of Geert Wilders, the AfD party, and Marine Le Pen in 2017.
Consequently, they need to be seen, at least in the weeks before their country’s elections (the Dutch general election is March 15th) to be taking a more nationalistic stance, in particular over the Muslim presence in Europe and the ‘threat’ of Islam. So from their viewpoint what better issue to take a stand on than political rallies held in Europe for Turkey’s Islamist President, especially since he’s getting all friendly with the transnational elite’s number one bogeyman: Vladimir Putin.
Right on cue, the globalists’ favored French presidential candidate, the former investment banker and so-called “centrist,” Emmanuel Macron, has come out and called for France to support its European partners and “reject the Turkish government’s abuses,” which he said target “European values.”
However, this deeply cynical strategy of bashing Turkey to gain domestic electoral approval could easily backfire. If this were a game of whist, and clubs were trumps, then Erdogan is holding the ace and king, while the EU leaders, for all their new-found outspokenness, are only holding a seven and a five.
Erdogan’s ace is the threat to open Turkey’s borders to allow millions more refugees to enter Europe. He did, in fact, make that threat last November if the EU blocked membership talks.
A new big influx of migrants is likely to propel Marine Le Pen to the Elysees Palace and end Merkel’s reign in Germany.
Erdogan’s ‘king,’ as it were, would be to move even closer to Moscow and announce that he was planning to “review” Turkey’s membership of NATO. That would also cause panic in Western capitals.
In June last year, the Washington Post-owned Foreign Policy ran an article entitled ‘How do you solve a problem like Erdogan.’
Expect more of the same sort of pieces in neo-con publications in the weeks ahead. But remember, this, like ISIS/Al-Qaeda terrorism, is a ‘problem’ of the Transnational Elite’s own making.
Read the full article at RT Op-Edge
Against the Grain 