Author: Vision & Global Trends – 26/07/2023
On July 20, Belgrade was playing host to the first conference of the RE:UNION Forum of Free Peoples of Europe.
Speakers from France, Spain, Italy, Montenegro, Greece, North Macedonia, Russia, Bulgaria and the United States spoke via teleconference during the conference.
Scientists, journalists and bloggers came together to discuss the future of the European continent, which is facing a serious threat these days. The crisis of political elites and the degradation of the once prosperous Europe leads to negative long-term consequences for the entire continent, and the world as a whole.
During the conference, the speakers discussed the main problems of modern-day Europe, including the crisis of freedom in the EU and of traditional values, the militarization of Europe by the US, freedom of speech and conscience, the migration crisis as well as security and regional conflicts. Meeting as part of the several modules of the high-profile gathering, the speakers and participants searched for answers to today’s hot-button issues.
In his report, titled “Three reasons why NATO will fall apart if Ukraine joins it,” Scott Ritter, columnist, journalist and an ex-US Marine intelligence officer, noted, “NATO has always competed with Russia, but has never entered into a direct military confrontation.” However, the alliance has always sought to expand, including at the expense of others.
“Jens Stoltenberg is talking about the creation of an additional 3,000 grouping on the border with Russia. Who will pay for this?” Ritter wondered, adding that NATO today is creating existential threats for Russia, with consequences that just can’t be overestimated. Summing up his report, Scott Ritter said: “In order for Europe to break away from NATO and the United States, it needs to rethink its security.”
During his presentation, dubbed “The Anti-NATO movement in the Basque Country,” Acer Eransi, a public activist from Spain, said that the significance of the anti-NATO movement is more relevant today than ever before. The world community hears little about it, but it exists. Eransi mentioned the times when Spain resisted NATO domination and also the clans that govern Spain, who betrayed their ideals and are now blindly following NATO’s common agenda. Many people living in NATO member states are not happy about their countries’ joining the Alliance. Unfolding simultaneously with the process of European integration that was happening at the start of the 21st century, was a massive “Euro-Atlantic integration” one, aimed at expanding the NATO bloc and forcing a number of Eastern European countries to initiate a pricey reformatting of their defense industry, as well as incur additional budget expenses to “comply with NATO standards” and protect against external threats, often simply invented to support the US military-industrial complex. Imagined threats have tragic consequences; suffice it to see what is happening in Ukraine. It was the mercantile and inhumane attitude of Europe and the United States towards the sovereignty of that country and its people that has led to such tragic consequences.
Add to this many years of anti-Russian propaganda, economic and political destruction. At the same time, the false notion about Russia’s responsibility for the economic recession and inflation in Europe, about the military threat that Moscow allegedly poses to the whole of Eastern Europe, and Russia’s support for the “totalitarian regime” in Syria, which in fact is the only factor of stability in the country, is being actively instilled into the Europeans’ minds. All this is done to justify the growing military spending and unite Europeans in the face of a completely artificial external threat.
In his report, called “The EU is the Fourth Reich. Britain is a prison of nations. The relevance of the national liberation struggle of the small peoples of Europe,” Roman Antonovsky, writer, political scientist and author of the Telegram channel “Sons of the Monarchy,” rightfully emphasized that “the modern European Union is more and more reminiscent of the Fourth Reich… and has found itself on the brink of an abyss,” because Americans sit on the European Commission and make decisions in favor of the United States. Moreover, cheap energy sources have stopped flowing to Europe due to the sanctions war. Therefore, now is the right time to rethink the concept of the European Union as such. This is primarily in the best interest of its residents, who suffer from the biased policy of unification and from the yoke of the United States. The EU has done everything to ensure that the voices of the people are not heard, despite the fact that a large number of ordinary citizens and thinkers in Europe do not agree with what is going on.
“The sovereignty of the small peoples of Europe is suppressed by the big peoples, the main beneficiaries are Germany and France,” Antonovsky noted. One of the results of the Second World War was the recognition of the small nations’ interests and also of the multiethnic nature of Europe. One might think that it was the rights of peoples to self-identification that became one of the cornerstones of the emerging European Union. However, Brussels immediately took a selective stance on this issue, ignoring both the problems of the Catholic Irish minority in Northern Ireland and marginalizing the Russian-speaking minorities in the Baltic countries, many of whose representatives, in the wake of the Soviet breakup, found themselves not only without the right to use their native language in government, but also without citizenship of the countries they live in.
While paying lip service to the need to protect the culture and language of the ethnic minorities, the EU authorities ignored the problems of many of them in neighboring territories by participating in the formation of the federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, to the detriment of the interests of Serbs and Croats, by turning a blind eye to the problem of Rusyns and Hungarians in Ukraine, Catalans and Basques in Spain, and at the same time supporting the Finno-Ugric separatist movements in Russia.
Speakers at the conference also criticized the EU for its disrespect for the national identity and values of its new member states, where the process of cultural and economic integration was set in motion much to the detriment of their historical traditions, religion and economic interests. At the same time, numerous NGOs in Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, funded by Brussels and Washington, started “promoting Western values” and “fighting nationalism,” which in fact comes in the form of LGBT propaganda, criticism of the national religion and defaming nationally oriented politicians.
Alexander Ionov, Russian businessman and politician, head of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia called his report: “Totalitarian Europe”. About 40 years ago, this phrase would have sounded like an oxymoron, but today it is a bitter reality. A year ago, the US authorities opened a criminal case against Alexander, and calls for similar action against the activist started coming also in the EU. This is the sad reality we now have and a very large sum in dollars has been offered for information about Alexander. However, he is not the only one who is persecuted both in the US and in Europe.
By the turn of the 2020s, freedom of speech and freedom of conscience, which had been the fundamental European values for two centuries, actually turned into a fiction. Starting with the administrative and criminal prosecution of opponents of LGBT propaganda under the pretext of combating “homophobia,” Washington, London, Paris and Brussels quickly imposed what is nothing less than full-blown censorship. Amid the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, many EU countries that formally are not participating in this conflict have introduced laws that allow criminal prosecution of public statements in support of Russia.
In addition, the EU’s ruling circles are successfully using hybrid methods of dealing with dissidents. For example, a “culture of cancellation” already established in European society makes it possible, even without using any administrative mechanisms, to completely exclude from scientific activity or public life any person whose opinion runs counter to the “new European values.” Bypassing national and pan-European laws, “politically objectionable” activists are being deprived of their jobs, bank accounts, the right to freedom of expression in social networks, and most importantly, of their very physical freedom, which they are deprived of under a “far-fetched” pretext.
To top it all off, an even more unpleasant consequence of the collapse of real democratic values was a political crackdown on “dissidents” unleashed in a number of EU countries. So, from the “popular” accusations of “espionage” in favor of Russia or China, which landed Mateusz Piskorski, a politician, and the famous Spanish military journalist Pablo Gonzalez in Polish jails, the EU moved on to the introduction of “political” articles in national criminal codes. These include “anti-state activities” in Estonia and Latvia, and propaganda of Russian aggression in Germany and in the Scandinavian countries. Over the past five years, this has created a huge number of precedents that allow people to be imprisoned for voicing their opinion, defending justice, traditional values and the right to a normal upbringing of their children.
The case of Joseph and Svetlana Rose, public activists from the United States, who were forced to move to Russia, is a good example of the struggle for a decent future and justice. In their address at the conference, they explained why they had to leave America. At present, most of the EU countries and the United States have embarked on a course that rejects traditional values, protection of the family and motherhood. The LGBT community is now free to use schools and colleges to promote sexual permissiveness, to push immature teenagers to change their sex, while legally excluding their families from the educational process. Numerous alarm bells sounded by psychiatrists about the exceptionally harmful nature of such “educational courses” for children are not only tabooed by media and social networks, but are even outlawed. Meanwhile, in the second decade of the 21st century, protection of the rights of members of the LGBT community has lost all its relevance since its representatives are now actually forcing upon others their superiority and their values, demanding quotas in public administration, institutions of education, culture and arts and even in sports, where athletes who have declared themselves “transgender” now compete unfairly with women.
This conference is the beginning of a long journey of struggle for justice, objectivity and freedom. The organizers plan to establish the Assange Prize, to be awarded to fighters for freedom of speech at subsequent forums and conferences.