EU affairs – Page 2 – Newropeans Magazine

Where will this insanity lead us?

6:15 6-02-2017 gefira.org

https://gefira.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Cecil-Rhodes-2.jpg — photo Danie van der Merwe / University of Cape Town – Statue of Rhodes by Marion Walgate. Unveiled in 1934, and commissioned by a state-run university.

If you think mathematics is about numbers, calculations and things like these, you are wrong. Mathematics is also about “restoring the cultural dignity of children.”If you think mathematics is acultural, then you are in the wrong; true, mathematics used to be perceived that way but it should not, since “an acultural mathematical curriculum […] distorts the facts that children learn about how mathematics has evolved and who has contributed to this evolution.”If you further think mathematics is an objective branch of knowledge which students ought to master, then, yes you guessed it, you are wrong. Students ought to be encouraged to use mathematics “to critique aspects of society” and, indeed, to “critique mathematics” itself because its “algorithms structure our lives in ways which reproduce inequality”,which is elegantly referred to as “weapons of math destruction”.If you think decolonisation is about lands and nations, then again you are wrong. Nowadays we are in need of decolonising university curricula, science and the language of instruction.

What’s wrong with mathematics? Indictment number one: it has been created by “dead white men” (so has English literature) who thus continue to “control things”.Indictment number two: mathematics “has a problem with diversity”. Why? Because “all over the world, black and women mathematicians remain rare”.Indictment number three: mathematics (and many other branches of science) “perpetuates stereotypes about who belongs in the field”. And who does? “Gifted people”, and since e.g. in “2013, 73% of math doctorates were male and 94% were white or Asian” and “the proportion of women pursuing mathematics PhDs between 2004 and 2013 actually fell, from 34% of students to 27% of students” mathematics is reprehensibly racist and biased against females.Indictment number four: mathematics is “all too often Eurocentric, paying homage to the fair-skinned Greeks as the purveyors of most of our significant mathematical knowledge”.

From the USSR to the EU

16:14 10-01-2017 gefira.org

When the so called communist system had crumbled in Eastern European countries, their respective societies embraced Western-style democracy and economy, which, taking into consideration the development gap between the two systems came as no surprise. What was stunning, however, was the fact that yesterday’s communists became today’s social-democrats; yesterday’s enemies of the West transpired as today’s ardent friends of the west; yesterday’s anti-liberal propagandists had no difficulty changing sides and becoming today’s pro-liberal propagandists; why, to top it all, yesterday’s Moscow’s footstools turned into the Kermlin’s fierce critics. It does not stand to reason that they (i) became capitalists overnight and that (ii) they converted to western values in droves.

The same people in a position of power who before 1989 would punish their compatriots for entertaining a mere thought of emigrating to the West or copying Western-style political or economic solutions; the same people at the helm who would not even ponder leaving the Warsaw Pact and joining NATO, arguing that geopolitics was such as to impediment any such attempts, the same people after 1989 came to laugh at the opponents of the European Union or NATO.

ECB policy makes the end of the eurozone possible

14:30 21-12-2016 gefira.org

A break-up of the eurozone due to the European Central Bank and its Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP) should not be treated like a science-fiction scenario. The more government bonds the ECB buys, the smaller becomes the problem of a country’s insolvency and debt conversion into French francs or Greek drachmas. Eventually, who cares if all the bonds are kept by the institution that cannot go bankrupt and that is out of the financial market?

Let us recall: the exclusion of Greece from the Euro Area was impossible in 2012 due to a large amount of Greek debt held by foreign banks, which were rescued by the ECB, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. These institutions, called Troika, saved banks and private creditors, not the Greeks: 95% of the bailout money went to banks, as a study of the European School of Management and Technology proved.

NGOs are smuggling immigrants into Europe on an industrial scale

13:40 4-12-2016 gefira.org

For two months, using marinetraffic.com, we have been monitoring the movements of ships owned by a couple of NGOs. Using data from data.unhcr.org., we have kept track of the daily arrivals of African immigrants in Italy. It turned out we were witness to a big scam and an illegal human traffic operation.

Brussels fears free speech

14:23 3-12-2016 gefira.org

photo: The Death of Socrates — Jacques-Louis David [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Replace freedom of speech with hate speech and you get rid of the former, basking on moral high ground of fighting the latter.

There was a time when people in the Eastern Bloc were forbidden to listen to Radio Free Europe, The Voice of America or any other western broadcaster on pain of, depending and country and period, severe or mild punishment. The mentioned radio stations were jammed most of the time, which was not the only countermeasure that was implemented: the government-controlled mass media would target selected news and in an attempt to spread “information literacy” raise the citizens’ awareness of the dangers of being exposed to hostile Western propaganda which, allegedly, went out of their way to create the impression of failed socialist states.

Basta euro! How Italy will reintroduce the lira

14:35 1-12-2016 gefira.org

photo: Shutterstock/Paolo Querc — photo Shutterstock/Paolo Querc

After what to many came down as an unexpected result of the British referendum, another one could further accelerate the implosion of the European Union, this time in Italy. December 4th the Italians will be voting on political reforms. Thanks to the law of unintended consequences, these changes will pave the way for a subsequent referendum where people might be asked to vote whether the country should return to the lira as its legal tender.

To understand why, we first have a look at the current political structure. The Italian parliament is made up of the Chamber of the Deputies (the lower house), and the Senate (an upper house), which are endowed with the same power. New legislation has to be approved by both chambers before it becomes law. Italy has about ten political parties, making it hard to create a coalition and form a government that gets the backing of a majority in both houses.

Germany is replacing the European Union with the “Mitteleuropa” Project

14:47 30-11-2016 gefira.org

Germany in, France out? German preponderance in Central Europe and… in Western Europe as well? Revival of the Holy Roman Empire (Sacrum Imperium Romanum) with Sclavinia, Gallia, Roma, and Germania paying homage to the German emperor, nay, chancellor? A Forth Reich in the making?

Smoke was far from subsiding over the trenches of the battlefields of World War One when in 1916 a book was published. Its title was Mitteleuropaand its author: Friedrich Naumann. The war was about making a new deal between the superpowers at the turn of the 20^th century: Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, France and England. A deal about re-assigning African and Asian colonies and a new order in Europe. At that time no one could know how the war would end: it was not generally assumed that Austria-Hungary would disappear from the political map or that Russia would drastically change its political system. It was rather taken for granted that the superpowers would have to make mutual concessions and that they could only expand at the cost of smaller nations. Where were they to be found? In Central Europe, from the Baltic down to the Mediterranean: Courland (present day Latvia), Lithuania, Poland, Czechia, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria to name a few.

High Treason: How the euro destroyed the economies of Southern Europe with the complacency of their ruling classes

7:13 19-11-2016 gefira.org

The great advantage brought by the common currency to Southern European economies that is often pointed up by supporters of the euro is the stability of the currency. It is often overlooked, however, that the impact that the euro and fixed exchange rates in general have had since its introduction was unfavourable. Italian and French economies have turned from net exporters to net importers whereas Spain, Portugal and Greece have amplified the magnitude of their trade deficit.

Brussels will force the Dutch to accept their failed Ukraine policy

7:26 16-11-2016 gefira.org

61% of the Dutch voters rejected the Ukraine association treaty in a referendum this year. 31% of the population showed up, which is a far larger number than of those who turned up at Maidan to protest. For the second time the Dutch population cast its vote in a referendum, for the second time the outcome will be nullified in the name of European Democracy.

European leaders have celebrated the Maidan revolution as the attempt of Ukrainian people to join the family of liberal democracies of Western Europe. It couldn’t be further from the truth. In the official version presented in the West, Maidan protests were spontaneously sparked off when the pro-Russian Yanukovich government renounced to ratify an association agreement with the European Union.

Yet in November 2013, before the Maidan movement even started, Oleg Tsarov, member of the Ukrainian parliament, had reported in a parliamentary session on the recruitment of activists organized by the US embassy in Kiev for unknown purposes.

The US embassy in Kiev, via its representative Victoria Nuland, would later become a primary actor in pressuring for a regime change and the formation of a pro-West government in the first months of 2014. For clarity, Victoria Nuland is the third in charge of the US foreign policy, second only President Obama and John Kerry, who had been busy negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran.

How to fix economy? Romanians know that… (INFOGRAPHICS)

8:42 15-11-2016 gefira.org

Caught in the act: NGOs deal in migrant smuggling

8:35 10-11-2016 Archive Redaction

Abandoned boat on the coast — photo Shutterstock / Nightman1965

Ship-tracking software and reports from journalists prove that NGOs, the Italian Coast Guard and smugglers coordinate their actions. The Automatic Identification System (AIS) exposes NGOs operating in Libyan territorial waters. Since the ouster of President Ghadafi, a growing number of Africans are smuggled into Europe. They travel via Libya from where they cross the Mediterranean. Different “humanitarian” organisations or NGOs involved are an indispensable part of the smuggle route to Europe. We noticed that the Italian coast guard, NGOs and locals coordinate their actions. Whatever they call it themselves, these operations cannot be classified as genuine rescue operations.

The Dutch, Maltese and German based NGOs are part of the human smuggling network and one wonders, are these NGOs themselves criminal organisations.

Whatever the motives of these NGOs, their behaviour is illegal, and in countries governed by a constitution, i.e. European states, crime should be prosecuted regardless of the intention of its perpetrators.

We followed the movements of the Golfo Azzurro on 12 October. We used AIS Marine Traffic signals, twitter and the live reports of a Dutch journalist on board of the Golfo Azzurro.

Death road to Europe promoted on the web

8:33 10-11-2016 Archive Redaction

Jonathan Samuels, Sky News Correspondent, and his team discovered a discarded handbook, printed in Arabic, on the shore of the Isle of Lesbos, providing the migrants with detailed information on the routes, important phone numbers, non-government organizations that aid the migrants and on their rights in target countries. WatchTheMed (watchthemed.net and alarmphone.org) and w2eu (w2eu.info and w2eu.net) are among the organizations listed in the said rough guide.