Europe Needs To Re-evaluate Its Importance And Its American Vassalization

To break up with America, Europe would have to leave NATO and kick out the US military. The US has run operations like Gladio all over western Europe to keep their politicians in line. The docile subservience of European leaders seems like a function of a fear of having happen to them what happened to Olaf Palme. As both Biden and Schumer have said, the US can make things happen and no one will know.

Shipping basic industry to someone you then decide to treat as an enemy is like handing someone your gun, then saying “I hate you and I want to kill you.”

Not smart.

This is what makes you a great read. Moreover, this reinforces my belief that our social betters are not some evil geniuses, but just incompetent fools. The latter makes more sense as now our politics and economy are directed by MBAs and lawyers, not by anyone with knowledge of technology and the sciences. By contrast, until recently, the Chinese government was a government by people with engineering degrees who knew how stuff got made.

Good luck with that.

Among the European governing class, questioning subservience to America is a faux pas on the level of questioning the European Union, or interrupting a High Papal Mass to demand that the person who just farted please identify himself.

It doesn’t matter that the whole church stinks and that nobody believes a word of the Mass, You Just Don’t Do That, and Europeans, if they are nothing else, they are all about The Done Thing.

To give one example, I recall sitting at a banquet table with a bunch of Eurobusiness types. Germans, mostly. All highly educated and credentialed. Very impressed with themselves. The entertainment was an opera singer, because, of course, the host organization had pretensions to being A Force For Culture.

I can listen to opera, but watching these people sit through the music and, best of all, watching them pretend to like it, because that is what Cultured European Intellectuals are supposed to do, was 169% pure Comedy Gold. The sighs of relief when the entertainment was over were palpable, as were the expressions of pain on the listeners’ faces while the singer hit the bravissima high notes like she was stabbing an enraged Great Horned Owl.

Fact is, Europeans *like* being slaves. Slaves don’t have to take responsibility or make decisions. And Europeans tell themselves that a house slave making dainties and luxury trinkets has it pretty good, compared with the life of a field slave toiling in a factory or a sweatshop in the Global South. Didn’t none other than Borrell say that Europe was a “garden”, compared to the “jungle” of the rest of the world?

It’s tempting to say that we’ll soon be seeing Chinese cars sold at Harbor Freight under the Chicago Electric brand name (with strangely identical but far more expensive cars having more familiar brand names like Tesla and Samsung), but that might be a bit too low hanging fruitish.

More likely is that Whirlpool will buy Boeing, fire most of its employees, and sell Chicago Electric planes under the once reliable Maytag name. I mean Boeing name. I doubt they’ll be sold at Harbor Freight though.

I try to tell people that there are videos out there made by lifelong appliance repairmen who’ll tell you about the latest in corporate supply chain dismemberment, and also who to buy from if one wants better quality that lasts based on their own experience, but it seems that most brainwashed consumers would rather put their faith and hope in some Lowes ad. Then they’ll say the same prayer to bless their shiny new appliance as they do an ice cream cone they still want to eat after it fell on the ground.

I can remember lawyer jokes from days of old. Maybe we need a few Austrian School jokes today. And MBA jokes too. And maybe a few about European vassal states starting to wonder just what kind of clusterfuck their America betters will be leading them into next.

To continue the thought . . . Europe’s vassalisation therefore is an outcome of a western elite that has only loose affiliation to a nation and its people, and of a widespread belief in the manifest destiny of Western civilisation (the garden vs the jungle as Borrell so aptly put it) over the rest, and whatever it does is for the best (even if that means turning a blind eye to sabotaging vital Nordstream gas pipelines).

The elites don’t care, because they have never governed in the interests of the people. And the people will be bought off by fables of fighting to uphold democratic values and some economic crumbs.

I’ll 2nd Stewart M, Ian, thank you for the detailed deep dive into European sychophancy to the Hegemonic and failing Empire. You have what is sometimes called a gimlet eye, an ability to see things without the blinders of idiotic biases or education-inculcated cant which which most “pundits” in “developed” (techno-blinded, money worshiping, shallow & dumbly materialistic as well as anti-humanistic) societies. (Sic as to society, since these same types, PMC or full-on MAGA have all accepted Ayn Rand’s & then Thatcher’s “There is no society, their is only the MARKET!!”) In fact, that is what makes you an actual pundit (from an Indian word for a sage or deep thinker; David Brooks would not be fit to shine an actual pundit’s sandals.) . . . The little I can add to what you cover is that I feel bad for the Europeans because the more they cater to the sociopath, degenerate (I use this adjective in primarily a medical and not necessarily moralistic sense, though that applies as well) Empire as it falls to pieces, the less they are respected and the more they can (& will) be sacrificed to the Empire’s very failed Crusade to submit all of humanity to our God the Market, as personified in the American “shining city” of mindless entertainment, toxic synthetic “food”, violence, retrograde religiosity & reactionary greed. For now their economies are being rapidly deindustrialized and disarmed (to provide for the failed Slavic crusade against the filthy Russkies who defeated Hitler & Bandera), soon they may be forcing these people to fight without the weapons they’ve already thrown away. I am completely incapable of seeing the specifics of how it will degenerate, but it certainly can’t go well. Some will, like the Fuhrer’s “good Germans” gladly march into their own extinction, the piggish Poles (Mr. Spiegelman certainly got that right in “Maus”) first, the supine Germans next . . . I would hope the French are fighting their own Abusers at home (as continues currently) instead of playing cannon fodder for the U$s endless NeoCon wars of conquest, and that perhaps the Spanish, many of whom my age & older actually recall living under fascism, and perhaps the Italians, far enough removed geographically from the latest failed color revolution, do decline to throw their “old Europe” (as Rumsfeld spat as an insult) down the Colonial drain, we shall see. I appreciate the first, Stevia comment also, yes, the European leaders must understand Gladio and fear it, but might also at some point realize that they have more to lose by capitulating than resisting, and seeing their whole societies consumed in another U$ proxy war. It’s going to end very, very badly for much of Europe. It’s going to go somewhat better for China, Russia, India, Hungary, Brazil etc. for awhile if they don’t lose the thread, possibly even Mexico in the more distant future? I can only think of the heroic resisters in the occupied Netherlands who were forced to manufacture bullets for the Reich and committed internal sabotage by not including the gunpowder so the shells were useless when fired by the retreating Germans on the Eastern front. Of course, many of these heroes were caught and punished, but think about the lives they saved in the long run, even as their own were endangered.

DC,

So I vote evil, not stupid or incompetent.

The small southern town–and indeed, the whole county–I originally hailed from was a textile manufacturing area. I’m sure it was a key area in America’s WWII effort, where we not only made millions of uniforms for our own armed forces, but extra to send to the British/Commonwealth and Soviet forces.

The workers who worked there in my boyhood were non-unionized, and glancing by their “mill houses”, they didn’t make much. In no way whatsoever where they compensated as well as say, UAW workers. But they got crushed by globalization too just as much if not more than the UAW. There are no textile mills in my small town anymore, it’s been gentrified to house commuters to the nearby big city.

So, it wasn’t primarily about crushing unions. It was about PROFIT, pure and simple, and textile mill jobs were easier to ship abroad to than other kinds of jobs, even including union jobs. Crushing unions was a side benefit. It was done by calculations by MBAs for short-term profits with no thought of not only the possible importance of these industries to the nation as a whole, but even blind to the long-term futures of their particular business firms. It’s highly ironic that these same types, who tell plebes that they should “focus on long term results” in their 401ks are the very same types who manage their companies by weekly blips in the stock markets. If they’re so smart, then why do the companies they manage eventually go bankrupt?

This goes back to previous postings and comments by Ian on the use of force, and how/why people delude themselves. The reason why the US went away from a mass conscript army to a small professional force I would argue has little to do with military science or competence; in fact, the US military performance excepting the first Iraq War (which wasn’t much of a contest, really) has been rather underwhelming. No, it was a structure to be used to maintain empire, to “shock and awe” some hopelessly outgunned nation to bring it or their leaders to heel. But it may not be sustainable in a long, ‘real’ war, and moreover, due to globalization a lot of the support industries that the US once had to maintain a large military for (like a textile industry!) are no more.

So, in a matter as important as war (i.e., your survival) and you make decisions that make your military weaker and *more likely to lose* against a powerful opponent, all for a transient advantage, isn’t that the very definition of stupid?

@StewartM,

I’ll meet you halfway. I will vote for evil AND stupid. I continue to think that the unionized heavy-thingmaking industries and their unions were a major target of the Free Trade conspirators. But the labor-and-conditions arbitrage opportunities they created were also created for the non-unionized industries of the so-called “Right To Work” states as well, who also lost out bigly thereby.

I remember reading somewhere that in the final years of the Vietnam War, the US Army was experiencing enough fraggings of junior officers in the field, enough riots and rebellions on ships and on bases, etc. that the US Army realized that a large part of the draftee army had become highly disgruntled mil-trained former and future civilians who were not happy campers within the borders of military jurisdiction.

The upper level officer class did not want to face such a mass of armed, trained and unhappy conscripts ever again. The way to avoid that was to move to a smaller staffing-levels professional army.

How much of my memory on that might be correct?

@Feral Finster I grew up with an opera singer and greatly appreciate your description.

I agree with everybody, as just different facets of the same problem.

The main difference here is as always the main difference between collectivist societies, and the “entitlement, superiority and exceptionalism” version within which many of us grew up.

So, instead of examining and understanding the causes of the disgruntled drafted military, the officers declare it unacceptable to have to deal with it. That’s arrogance, entitlement, superiority, etc.

We now know the draftees were exactly correct in being disgruntled (and disgruntled doesn’t come close to describing the hell they were going through). We should know now that the officers’ response is definitely not a collectivist response, it’s a response that says “it’s all about meeeeeeeeee” that puts all issues squarely back within the frame of exceptionalism and entitlement of the “superiors” (the elites).

And I will argue until I die that they are not stupid. The entitlement, superiority, and feelings of exceptionalism are on full display in the elite’s actions and their words. That entitlement means they (are) making stupid decisions, but they are only stupid in terms of our (non-elite) collective well being.

Stupid is relative. Their sense of entitlement ensures our well being is never the issue, hence not stupid. Calling anyone else stupid is a claim to the mantle of superiority, but more importantly misses the underlying issues completely; it’s dismissive and unhelpful, just as was the officers’ response to a disgruntled military. Isn’t it also exceptionalism that is shown in actions that mow down people who look like immigrants? Or murder girlfriends who had an abortion? Or shootchildren and teachers in a school? Or when a young black person knocks on the wrong door, or goes jogging in the wrong neighbor?

They are literally killing us, poisoning us, bankrupting us, turning us against each other slowly. So the one thing we don’t want to do is be dismissive about what’s going on. We need to understand it thoroughly, so we can better deal with it, and maybe even change it. We need to be aware we were incubated in a culture that promotes exceptionalism and superiority, and that we were taught to believe that wealth is an indicator of exceptionalism, instead of what it really indicates: corruption, dishonesty, and fraud.

@StewartM,

Yes, the other response to the Vietnam Era Army Mutiny would have been to reserve armed force for fighting wars legitimate to fight for legitimate reasons. I suspect the Military Leadership knew very well that the Civilian Overlords would remain committed to Imperial Domination for decades into the future, and the Military Leadership was not prepared to overthrow the Civilian Overlords in order to put American Foreign policy back on a semi-isolationist track, so they wanted a professional volunteer army to have fewer future worries about any future force-wide disgruntlement.