The specter of total domination

By Paulino Cardoso - Donald Trump truly did Lula's government an incredible favor by, based on misinformation about the Brazilian political situation, imagining he could kill two birds with one stone: frighten the countries of the Global South by attacking Brazil's BRICS presidency and, as a bonus, give a boost to his South American vassal. If President Lula knows (and wants) to take advantage of this, it will be a great opportunity to get out of a tight spot, intimidate the National Congress, put a brake on the corporate media, and keep his base mobilized.

On the other hand, Agent Orange allowed dissidents like myself to deepen our reflection on the challenges facing the Brazilian left in freeing itself from the shackles imposed by subordination to the US Democratic Party and, for lack of a better term, European liberal democracies.

While I was pondering this, I happened to come across an interview with Pascal Lottaz, a Swiss-born professor based in Japan and researcher in Neutrality Studies, with Nel Bonilla, writer and researcher, responsible for the Substack “Worldliness: The Threads Connecting Geopolitics”, titled: Manipulated Elites. Washington's Mental War Against Europe, Here's the link to the Portuguese version.Excited, I went straight to the article that was the subject of the conversation.
Em Elite Capture and European Self-Destruction: The Hidden Architecture of Transatlantic Hegemony It is possible to understand the stance of the German leadership between the sabotage of Nord Stream and the agreement to spend 5% of GDP on NATO weapons. Anyone with two brain cells finds the anti-national stance of European leaders, marked by their genuflection before "Daddy Trump," strange.

The key explanation lies in a relevant quote where Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, dictated the 1924 memorandum on "ambitious young Mexicans." You know the phrase: open our universities to their elite, flood them with American values, and they will govern Mexico for us: better, cheaper, and without a single marine.

According to her, a hundred years after Lansing defined the project, Germany became its most perfect example. When Olaf Scholz's cabinet gave the green light for the destruction of Nord Stream 2, an act of economic self-sabotage with no plausible strategic benefit for Germany, and Merz, now chancellor, vowed never to use it again, they were betraying Germany. 

And, importantly, at the same time, they were "fulfilling a biographical destiny forged from their limited horizons, manufactured in Ivy League seminars, Pentagon workshops, and the velvet-lined rooms of the Atlantic Bridge."

Why are European elites setting their own house on fire?

reminding us of Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem (2020), Nel Bonilla shows us that, “the answer does not lie in pure and simple corruption or ideological fervor. It is much more banal and much more effective. The answer also lies in biographies, networks and institutions. It also lies in hegemony at the level of the functional elite: when dominant ideas become common sense. And, in this case, hegemony is not imposed only by violence, but by education, by recruitment by the elite and by ritualized repetition.”

According to her, Professor Inderjeet Parmar (2019) calls this structure the soft machinery of elite knowledge networks: “flows of people, money, and ideas” that institutionalize consensus from Washington to Berlin. The Fulbright Program, the German Marshall Fund, the Atlantik-Brücke, the Munich Security Conference, and the Bilderberg Meetings are formative ecosystems. They select, educate, and elevate those who can carry the worldview forward.

And here, what interests us most is that, “fundamentally, these networks are not passive forums. They are the “essential power technology of the American elites”: a mode of knowledge production and personnel selection that is spectacularly successful in globally reproducing a pro-US worldview. The socialization of the elite itself is not a benign process. It consolidates assumptions, defines what is politically imaginable, and naturalizes asymmetry.

Continuing, as Parmar observes, these networks define what counts as "thinkable thought" and "questions that can be asked." The Ford and Rockefeller foundations, the RAND Corporation, the Brookings, the Carnegie Endowment, and the Center for American Progress are elite integration machines where, through these processes of integration and socialization, a certain type of knowledge is transformed into power. Thus, a Fulbright or Atlantik-Brücke badge becomes a badge of total access to Brussels and Washington, D.C., and the surest way to "belong."

According to Nel Bonilla, European elites are not merely influenced by the United States. Through this system, they are shaped, professionally molded, and ideologically bound to it. Of course, not totally or completely, as if they had no autonomy whatsoever or as if national history had no influence on these elites, but each of the characteristics of these European nations will give a unique touch to the transatlantic worldview that guides their policies.

This same machinery designed to shape European elites can also be used not only to co-opt national elites, but also those individuals who, through non-governmental organizations, will make up Brazilian society and who, in times of representative democracy, occupy spaces of representation, social control, and later hold public office.

Nel Bonilla, by dissecting the way Atlanticist elites reproduce themselves in Europe, especially in Germany, allows us to understand how the US exerts its soft power, how co-optation occurs from a very young age. It is well known how NGOs, funded by the Ford Foundation, recommend young and potential leaders to pursue their master's and doctoral degrees in the United States. How many of these people have gone on to occupy positions of public visibility or even hold elected or non-elected office? 

If we leave civil society and go to the academic sphere, a key place for the reproduction of the middle class itself, we will see that this mechanism is much more visible. The academic world, especially in the humanities, is prolific in disseminating all postmodern ideologies, from multiculturalism to gender identities, which, disguised as civilizational achievements, are instruments for manufacturing consensus and exercising a geopolitics of knowledge. As the old Edgar De Decca said, in The Birth of Factories (1991), “The establishment of the market is also the establishment of a given register of rules, in which men think and act according to certain rules of the game.

Some foolish Brazilian leftists celebrated the rise of D Link in the last German elections. It was difficult to explain that they are part of a complacent left, which was given media visibility and became key to preventing the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, an anti-establishment, anti-war, and anti-woke left, from being elected to the German parliament. 

In short, Nel Bonilla can help us recognize the threads through which groups on the left and right are co-opted by Atlanticist forces, enabling the exercise of total spectrum dominance in Brazil, which prevents us from seeking national and popular alternatives. 

In conclusion, she herself outlines the mission: “Replacing personalities will not be enough. The task is to dismantle the biographical assembly line that begins with foundation-funded youth exchanges, passes through fellowships in think tanks, and ends in ministerial cabinets or corporate boards. Unless this treadmill is broken or, at least, diversified beyond the echo chamber of the Atlantic, any 'new faces' will replicate the same strategic reflexes. The alternative is stark: witness your nation bleed in service to the elites of another empire or regain the ability to decide your own future.”

“The choice, therefore, is no longer between the status quo and reform, but between hegemony and survival. The window for peaceful de-alignment may be closing, but it has not yet closed. Learning from history offers no guarantees, but it does offer opportunities for disruption.”

Source in Portuguese:https://sakerlatam.blog/captura-da-elite-e-autodestruicao-europeia-a-arquitetura-oculta-da-hegemonia-transatlantica/Original source:https://themindness.substack.com/p/elite-capture-and-european-self-destruction

References:

ARENDT, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2020. DE DECCA, Edgar. The birth of factories. São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1991.

2121 citations in total on Dimensions.

PARMAR, Inderjeet. Transnational Elite Knowledge Networks: Managing American Hegemony in Turbulent Times. Security Studies , Volume 28, Number 3, May 27, 2019, pp. 532-564(33) . DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09636412.2019.1604986