Europe in free fall

(Note: this column was written for the Unz Review http://www.unz.com/tsaker/europe-in-free-fall/)

Europe is in free fall. Nobody can doubt that any more. In fact, the is EU simultaneous suffering from several crucial problems and any one of them could potentially become catastrophic. Let’s look at them one by one.

The 28 member EU makes no economic sense

The most obvious problem for the EU is that it makes absolutely no economic sense. Initially, in the early 1950s, there was a small group of not too dissimilar nations which decided to integrate their economies, these were the so-called Inner Six who founded the European Community (EC): Belgium , France , West Germany , Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. In 1960 this “core group” was joined by seven more countries, the Outer Seven, who were unwilling to join the EC but wanted to join a European Free Trade Association (EFTA). These are Austria , Denmark , Norway , Portugal , Sweden , Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Together these countries formed what could loosely be called “most of western Europe”. For all their faults, these treaties did reflect a reality – that the countries participating in them had much in common and that their peoples wanted to join forces. After 1960, the history of the European integration and expansion became very complicated and while it progressed in zig-zags with regular setbacks, at the end of the day this process ended growing uncontrollably, just like a malignant tumor. Today the EU includes 28 (!) member states including all of what used to be called “central” and “eastern” Europe – even the ex-Soviet Baltic Republics are now part of this new union. The problem is that while such an expansion was attractive to the European elites for ideological reasons, such huge expansion makes no economic sense at all. What do Sweden, Germany, Latvia, Greece and Bulgaria have in common? Very little, of course.

Now cracks are clearly appearing. The Greek crisis and the threat of a “Grexit” has the potential for a domino effect involving the rest of the so-called “PIGS” (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain). Even France is threatened by the consequences of these crises. The European currency – the Euro – is a “currency without a mission”: is it supposed to support the German economy or the Greek one? Nobody knows, at least officially. In reality, of course, everybody understands that Frau Merkel is running the show. Quickfix solutions, which is what the Eurobureaucrats are offering, do only buy time, but they are offering no solution to what is clearly a systemic problem: the completely artificial nature of a 28 member EU.

As for the the obvious solution, to give up on the crazy dream of a 28 member EU, it is so absolutely politically unacceptable that it won’t even be discussed even while everybody fears it.

The EU is on the verge of a social and cultural collapse

The undeniable reality is simple as it is stark:

• The EU cannot absorb so many refugees
• The EU does not have the means to stop them

A massive influx of refugees present a very complex security problem which EU countries are not equipped to deal with. All EU countries have three basic instruments they can use to protect themselves from unrest, disorders, crime or invasions: the special/security services, the police forces and the military. The problem is that neither of these are capable of dealing with a refugee crises.

The special/security services are hopelessly outnumbered when dealing with a refugee crisis. Besides, their normal target (career criminal, spies, terrorists) are few and far in between in a typical wave of refugees. Mostly, what refugees are are families, often extended ones, and while they sometimes include criminal gangs, this is far from always being the case. The problem is that, say, a 10% of Kosovar drug dealers give a bad name to all the refugees from Kosovo and the refugees themselves ended up being treated like criminals. Finally, special/security services rely very heavily on informants and foreign gangs are hard to infiltrate. They often also speak difficult languages which only few local language specialist master. As a result, most of the time the EU security services are clueless as to who to deal with the security problem presented to them, if only because they lack the personnel and means to keep track of so many people.

In contrast, cops have an advantage of sorts: they are literally everywhere and they typically have a good sense of the “beat on the street”. However, their powers are severely limited and they need to get a court order to do most of their work. Cops also mostly deal with local criminals, whereas most refugees are neither local, nor criminals. The sad reality is that most of what cops do in a refugee crisis is provide riot police – hardly a solution to anything.

As for the armed forces, the very best they can do is to try to help close a border. In some cases, they can assist the police forces in case of civil disturbances, but that’s about it.

Thus the various states of the EU neither have the means to lock their borders or deport most refugees nor do they have the means to control them. Sure, there will always be politicians who will make promises about how they are going to send all these refugees back home, but that is a crude and blatant lie. The vast majority of these refugees are fleeing war, famine and abject poverty and there is no way anybody is going to send them back home.

Keeping them, however, is also impossible, at least in a cultural sense. For all the doubleplusgoodthinking propaganda about integrating all races, creeds and cultures the reality is that there is absolutely nothing the EU has to offer to these refugees to make them want to integrate it. For all it’s sins and problems, at least the USA is offering an “American dream” which, false as it might be, still inspires people worldwide, especially the unsophisticated and poorly educated. Not only that, but the US society is largely a-cultural to begin with. Ask yourself, what is the “American culture” to begin with? If anything, it is really a “melting pot” as opposed to a “toss salad” – meaning that whatever is tossed in this melting pot loses its original identity while the overall mixture of the pot fails to produce a real indigenous culture, at least not in a European sense of the word.

Europe is or, should I say, used to be radically different from the USA. There used to be real, deep, cultural differences between the various regions and provinces of each European country. A Basque is most definitely not an Catalan, a Marseillais is not a Breton, etc. As for the differences between an German and a Greek – they are simply huge. The result from the current refugee crisis is that all European cultures are now directly threatened in their identity and their life style. This is often blamed on Islam, but the reality is that African Christians don’t integrate any better. Neither do the Christian Gypsies, by the way. As a result, clashes happen literally everywhere – in shops, streets, schools, etc. There is not a single country in Europe where these clashes are not threatening the social order. These daily clashes result in crime, repression, violence and the ghettoization of both the immigrants and of the locals which leave their traditional suburbs and move to less immigrant-saturated areas.

[Sidebar: to my American readers who might think “so what? we have ghettos in the USA too” I will say that what the French call “zones de non-droit” (non-law zones) are far worse than anything you could see in the USA. And keep in mind that no country in the EU has the kind of huge, militarized, police forces which every major US city now has. Neither is there the equivalent of the US National Guard. At best, there are anti-riot forces like the French CRS, but they can only do so much.]

The level of aggravation suffered by many, if not most, Europeans directly resulting from this crisis in immigration is hard to describe to somebody who has not seen it. And since voicing such frustrations was considered as “racist” or “xenophobe” by the powers that be (at least until recently – this is progressively changing now), this deep resentment is mostly kept hidden, but it is perceptible nonetheless. And the immigrants most definitely feel it. Every day. And, again, this is why the notion of a US-style “melting pot” in Europe ain’t happening: the only thing Europe has to offer to all these hundreds of thousands of refugees is a silent hostility fed by fear, outrage, disgust and helplessness. Even those locals who used to be refugees themselves in the past (immigrants from North Africa, for example) are now disgusted and very hostile to the new wave of refugees coming in. And, of course, not a single refugee coming to Europe believes in any “European dream”.

Last but not least, these refugees are a huge burden on the local economies and the social services which were never designed to cope with such an influx of needy “clients”.

For the foreseeable future the prognosis is clear: more of the same, only worse, possibly much worse.

The EU is just a colony of the United States unable to defend her own interests

The EU is ruled by a class of people which are completely sold off to the United States. The best examples of this sorry state of affairs is the Libyan debacle which saw the US and France completely destroy the most developed country in Africa only to now have hundred of thousands of refugees cross the Mediterranean and seek refuge from war in the EU. This outcome could have been very easy to predict, and yet the European countries did nothing to prevent it. In fact, all these Obamawars (Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan) have resulted in huge movements of refugees. Add to this the chaos in Egypt, Mali and the poverty all over Africa and you have a mass-exodus which no amount of wall-building, ditch-digging or refugee tear gassing will stop. And if that was not enough, the EU committed what can only be called political and economic suicide by allowing the Ukraine to explode into a major civil war involving 45 million people, a completely destroyed economy and a bona fide Nazi regime in power. That outcome was also easy to predict. But all the Eurobureaucrats did is to impose self-defeating economic sanctions on Russia which ended up providing exactly the kind of conditions needed for the Russian economy to finally diversify and begin producing locally instead of importing everything from abroad.

It might be worth recalling here that after WWII Europe was basically an occupied territory. The Soviets had the central-eastern part while the US/UK had the western part. We all have been conditioned to assume that the people living under the “oppression” of what the US propaganda called the “Warsaw Pact” (in reality called the “Warsaw Treaty Organization”) were less free than those who lived under the “protection” of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Nevermind that the term “North Atlantic” was coined deliberately to tie western Europe to the USA, the central issue here is that while in many ways the folks in the West were, indeed, granted many more freedoms than those in the East, the US/UK occupied part of Europe never recovered true sovereignty either. And just as the Soviets carefully nurtured a local comprador elite in each East European country, so did the USA in the West. The big difference only appeared in the late 1980s early 1990s when the entire Soviet-run system came crashing down while the US-run system came out reinforced as a result of the Soviet collapse. If anything, since 1991 the US iron grip over the EU became even stronger than before.

The sad reality is simple: the EU is a US colony, run by US puppets who are simply unable to stand up for basic and obvious European interests.

The EU is in a deep political crisis

Up until the late 1980s, there used to be some more or less ‘real’ opposition ‘Left’ parties in Europe. In fact, Italy and France the Communists almost came to power. But as soon as the Soviet system collapsed, all the European opposition parties either vanished or were rapidly co-opted by the system. And, just as in the USA, former Trotskysts became Neocons almost overnight. As a result, Europe lost the little opposition it had to the AngloZionist Empire and became a ‘politically pacified’ land. What the French call “la pensée unique” or the “single thought” as now triumphed, at least if one judges by the corporate media. Politics has not turned into a make believe show where various actors pretend to deal with real issues when in reality all they talk about are invented, artificially created “problems” which they then “solve” (homosexual “marriage” being the perfect example). The only form of meaningful politics left in the EU is separatism (Scottish, Basque, Catalan, etc.) but so far, it has failed to produce any alternative.

In this brave new world of pretend politics nobody is in charge of real problem which are never tackled directly, but only shoved under the carpet until the next election and that inevitably only worsens everything. As for the EU’s AngloZionist overlords, they don’t care what happens unless their own interests are directly affected.

You could say that the Titanic is sinking and the orchestra keeps playing, and you would be close to the truth. Everybody hates the Captain and crew, but nobody know whom to replace them with.

The Saker