The Truth about Datagate

“We are no longer in the Cold War,” declared a spokesperson for the German Chancellor Angela Merkel yesterday. The French president echoed her in uncharacteristically harsh tones, asking for the immediate cessation of the National Security Agency’s massive spying operations on communications between European countries and their institutions, from Brussels to New York.

Revelations of “total surveillance” conducted by the NSA have set in motion a series of avalanches that, up until now, both the U.S. and Europe hypocritically justified officially as activities under the banner of the war on terror, the Holy Grail that is good for covering up the most unconstitutional actions perpetrated by governments.

In the following days, diplomatic offices of European countries, filled with men ever faithful to the Washington-Brussels axis, will surely be working to stop the avalanche. However, what no one seems to be able to cover up are the two real revelations: that the Cold War was never finished, only extended, and that the war on terror was engineered, used to cover many other activities.

According to Snowden’s revelations, Europe — with countries in various degrees of servitude toward U.S. economic, political and military power and, therefore, exposed to various degrees of “total surveillance” — as a whole and with its extra-Atlantic alliances is considered a strategic adversary to the United States, as much as China and Russia. Except, just like in the good old days, for the United Kingdom: the Trojan horse of U.S. intelligence in Europe — remember Echelon — and, for a long time, the major obstacle to the creation of a politically and militarily independent European Union.

Total surveillance carried out on European “allies” is the clearest proof that thousands and millions of dollars and euros — taken away from the citizens and their welfare by governments on both sides of the Atlantic in the name of the war on terror fostered by U.S. and European politics – have gone into financing colossal operations constructing a disguised police state on both sides (and who knows if another avalanche of revelations is coming, one of semi-secret accords between European governments, services and large telecommunications companies). The ideological cover of the struggle against the Soviet Union and its system having ended in 1989, powers in the U.S. had to find another Holy Grail to continue to channel immense resources toward military and intelligence equipment: The “clash of civilizations,” theorized by Samuel Huntington, created new borders for the clash between populations in the United States, while the first anti-terrorist plans of the Clinton administration (1992-2000) transformed targeted responses to criminal acts into an endless global plan of action. The events of Sept. 11, 2001 took it upon themselves to seal and deliver the Holy Grail to Bush Junior.

Europe, the chariot of the United States’ wars, fell into the trap completely — or went along with it enthusiastically — believing that by doing so they are able to limit an eco-political war with Washington; the war is instead in the numbers of the global economy and in the encounters between a power in relative decline, like the U.S., and the emerging powers. The fact that Washington, on the other side of the facade, is convinced of the inevitability of such an encounter is there for all to see, but everyone is gambling on the ability of the European powers-that-be to rise to the challenge and channel it toward a more explicit and autonomous European imperialism. Workers are deciding whether there may be a third option.