STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Photo Signifying End of the European Union?
By Joe Jarvis - March 14, 2012

On Monday night in Brussels the choreography went horribly wrong: Jean Claude Juncker, head of the group of 17 euro zone finance ministers, was snapped strangling his Spanish counterpart. Manifestement it was all a big joke: wasn't actually throttled and Jan Kees De Jager, the Dutch finance minister looming behind him, didn't wade in with his fist either. But the grim look on Mr de Guindos' face shows it wasn't all that funny – but nor was it entirely unexpected. Moments before, the eurogroup had approved the €130bn (£108bn) bailout package for Greece. After five months of wrangling – and just a week before Greece was due to default – the deal should have been a cause for some celebratory plate-smashing at least. But behind the scenes, Spain had hijacked the meeting. In a tersely-worded statement, the eurogroup announced they had agreed to relax Spain's deficit target for 2012 – from 4.4pc set by Brussels last year to 5.3pc. Spain had won some unscheduled breathing space. But what really angered Juncker was that in winning the concession, Madrid had stirred a radical retaliation of "sinner states" against the northern pusche for austerity and central control. – UK Telegraph

Dominant Social Theme: Look at these two guys kidding around. What's a photo op among friends?

Free-Market Analysis: The UK Telegraph has posted a photo of Jean Claude Juncker, head of the group of 17 eurozone finance ministers, strangling his Spanish counterpart, Luis de Guindos. Sometimes photos are extraordinarily revealing. Does this one mark the end of the EU, or at least the Euro? (You can see the photo at the top of the Telegraph article.)

The photo has been circulated around the world courtesy of AP. And AP, along with Reuters, is a main pillar of power elite control of the media. AP and Reuters are "news services" that provide the content and slant of most of the news that is reported by daily papers and electronic news services.

Human beings, in fact, are metaphorical creatures. EVERYTHING is metaphorical to a naked ape. This may be because of our tool-making abilities. In order to visualize a tool, one has to think below the surface, to visualize not just the problem but the solution. Metaphor – or the visualization of metaphor – is a secondary characteristic of a primary survival trait.

Thus, the dissemination of this powerful photo is, perhaps, no accident. Below, we list three other photos that have taken on iconographic status. They stood for a good deal more than a single image. They are all metaphorical, of course.

There is the photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt of an American sailor kissing a young nurse on V-J Day in Times Square in New York City, on August 14, 1945, that officially signified the end of World War II. The photo captured the jubilation people felt at the end of a horrible war.

There is the famous photo by Neil Leifer of Muhammad Ali snarling over a defeated Sonny Liston at St. Dominick's Arena in Lewiston, Maine, May 25, 1965. The photo captured the rise of the Baby Boomer generation and a new kind of public dialogue in which youth would not be subservient to the "establishment."

And, of course, there is Nick Ut's terrible photo of 9-year-old Kim Phuc running naked down the street after an aerial napalm attack by the South Vietnamese, circa June 8, 1972. The photo illustrated, far more powerfully than words, the destructive effect of war on innocents and contributed to a wave of military repugnance.

Now, it is true, obviously, that all three photos are within the mainstream narrative of modern "history" – and we could argue that at least two of them were manipulated (and given wide coverage) to support a given power-elite narrative of DIRECTED history. Nonetheless, they are powerful iconographic images.

Now comes this photo of Juncker playfully strangling Luis de Guindos. Except that if you look at the photo, you will see that Guindos doesn't look amused in the slightest. And there is no doubt that Germany, under the thumb of the power elite, is trying to strangle Southern Europe – at least that's the mainstream "spin."

When you examine the photo closely, you can see that Juncker's hands are relaxed. He wants to strangle Guindos but he is not doing a very good job. Guindos's wary, almost disparaging gaze seems to warn us clearly that Spain (and the other so-called PIGS) are not going to be pushed much further.

He is not in pain, and he is certainly not frightened. His gaze seems to take the measure of the man playfully strangling him and within the recesses of this gaze we think we can see, along with the wariness, a certain contempt.

Is this the beginning of the end? Juncker represents a government that has mercilessly tortured Greek citizens into "austerity" – a ridiculous conglomeration of lower government benefits, higher taxes and longer work spans before "retirement."

Spain, Portugal and Ireland have all received the same treatment. But we have long waited for the pushback. Anyone reading history and observing the rise and fall of Rome knows that Europe is NOT populated by peaceable tribes. (Tribes they are. The French, for instance, look a good bit different than Germans, in aggregate, though it is not politically correct to say so. Oops.)

Anyway, the Spanish are a blending of certain tribes that likely go back tens of thousands of years – and are not a people to lightly cross. There are 50 million of them and they don't even agree among themselves, much less with Brussels.

Spain is a weighty nation-state indeed, and it is therefore fitting that increased pushback has been generated here. The Germans perhaps expected the Spanish to agree with the idea of setting the debt to GDP ratio below 3 percent, and it seemed there was an agreement on this front.

But not really. The Telegraph tells us this: "Mariano Rajoy [soon] announced Spain would break the rules. The quietly spoken prime minister said Spain would aim for a deficit target of 5.8pc of GDP for 2012. He acknowledged this was far above the 4.4pc set by authorities in Brussels but said he'd chosen his target rather than taking €44bn from the budget at a time of economic crisis. The new figure was both 'sensible and reasonable', he said – and a 'sovereign decision made by Spaniards.'"

See? Game on … Suddenly, sovereignty has re-emerged as an issue. We've been predicting this all along. The tribes of Europe were perfectly happy to go along, in aggregate, with Brussels while the Eurocrats were handing out money. But once the money stopped, so did the compliance.

Of course, the power elites that run Brussels – likely out of the City of London – continue to march like zombies toward the storm that is, in our view, brewing. They want global governance and the EU and other centralizing facilities are a way to bring this dream to fruition.

The power elite is in charge of government behind the scenes, via mercantilism. The larger and more complex the government, the better. It's one reason the elites seek global governance. The more complexity and the more size, the more the elites can get away with. The bigger the beard, the larger the looting.

The power elite evidently and obviously set up these horrid socialist environments in Europe in order to reduce them to rubble on purpose. The idea was apparently twofold. First, as we have pointed out in dozens of articles, the elites INTENDED to use a financial crisis to generate political as well as economic control.

Second, the elites have mercilessly focused on showing the world, via Greek bloodshed and despair, that there is no alternative to their pitiless and murderous New World Order. Greece – and austerity – are to be an object example.

Third, and this is a more speculative perspective, if the push-back became too intense, there are no doubt plans to reduce (at least shrink) the eurozone and even the EU itself. This would be, in our view, a fairly messy and violent procedure (certainly economically so) and might at this point be welcomed by the eurocrats as a way to generally increase suffering and chaos.

The elites are all about chaos, of course. Out of chaos, order: a New World Order, complete with a global IMF currency, etc. The more chaos, the more war, the more bloodshed, the more suffering, the more the average person will welcome the imposition of order, even if that order is highly authoritarian and bound to increase the very troubles that it is putatively designed to cure.

They are psychopathic people. At the very top, they seem to control central banking around the world. They are built out of dynastic families, apparently, measuring their rule in centuries if not millennia. Whether this is TRUE or not is another tale. What matters is that they likely believe it.

Having accepted their self-appointed duty to lead the world, these individuals will apparently do anything to fulfill the roles they have provided to themselves. Which brings us back to the photo we began with. Perhaps it is they, THEMSELVES, that have decided to release this illuminating and iconographic photo. Perhaps, as we pointed out at the beginning of this article, this photo has a meaning far beyond a kind of elitist horseplay.

Perhaps, in fact, it is a signal. What we call the Internet Reformation has begun to bite – and bite hard. The Greeks are in open rebellion. The Spanish have begun to speak once again of the dreaded "S" word – as in sovereignty. The Irish are scheduling a vote over the latest changes the Eurocrats want to make in their increasingly lawless attempts to ride roughshod over 300 million people.

This, then, is the import of the photo – if indeed there is "import." The violence inherent in the photo, the obvious splintering among Europe's great powers, all this is metaphorically suggested in this one iconographic image.

We would suggest – as dedicated watchers of elite dominant social themes – that such a photo could indeed mark a changing of tactics. The elites often operate this way. They signal their intentions.

And Caesar's spirit, raging for revenge,

With Ate by his side come hot from hell,

Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice

Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war …

-Julius Caesar Act 3, scene 1, 270–27

After Thoughts

Could it be that they have decided now to take DOWN the European Union? Could it be this is an alternative tactic, one born of rage and frustration but due to be carried out with clinical, cold-blooded efficiency? Is the EU a dead letter now? Are they signaling that those who have opposed them will get what "they deserve"?

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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