FREEDOM, Angela Merkel, 2024.

Rather than write a conventional review of her very long and detailed autobiography I decided to say something about where I placed her and her values in what increasingly looks like a very discomforting and scary World. She uses the word FREEDOM, but freedom for the selfish and powerful looks neither good nor wise to me.

As our world is being thrown into the political, social, economic and military tumble dryer quite frankly, I am frightened. I find myself going back to Archie Brown’s book on the end of the Cold War, The Human Factor, 2020.  Without Gorbachev that end would not have happened, but because of Bush the Elder Gorbachev who was half Ukrainian, was overthrown. The President of the USA did not want a Russia of friendly states smelling even slightly of socialism. He wanted full-on capitalism. That was where his values were embedded.

And later George W, Bush the younger, took it into his head to declare war on an abstract noun, Terror. According to the US Constitution only Congress can declare war. But if Terror is the agreed enemy then all any President has to do is to use the T word whenever a group or a country does or even says something unwanted and out come the bombs and the bullets.

Look at the media of the West whenever Hamas or Hezbollah are mentioned and what I would classify as resistance is automatically presented to us as aggression. Israeli Genocide? No, there are still some babies alive so it can’t be genocide.

Merkel demonstrates in her book that she is a disciple of the West, the capitalist West. And the European Union? Forget the idealism of its founders which was never confined to commercialism. Her EU was aligned with NATO. And in all the many pages she gives us on Ukraine it is clear that we are looking at American imperialism.

The American purpose of NATO? In any war between the USA and the old USSR the bombs would have fallen on Europe, well away from America. Why European politicians cannot see this bemuses me.

Greece?

It is worth reading Adults in the Room: My Battle With Europe’s Deep Establishment by Yanis Varoufakis, 2017.

Clearly the powerful and rich European North felt it could exploit a powerless and skint country in the European South. So it did.

Varoufakis recorded his meetings with the powerful and rich and, guess what, they knew what they were doing and had not the slightest shame.

Her book makes clear that Merkel always wanted to be an insider. And so she became, and still is I would say, what we used to call An Establishment Figure.

But today, and the reason for my fear, that tumble dryer had been switched on.

The West has no Corbyn. People like him are not allowed to ask awkward questions. And they are certainly not allowed near the tumble dryer switch.

Today’s European North, the disciples of mighty capitalism? Not doing very well are they?