One Albatross to Another

Europe did not fall into the US pocket after World War 2 as a result of the US “winning” the war. It was the Soviet Union that had sacrificed most to “win” that war and Europe did not fall into the Soviet pocket.

Europe fell into the US pocket because it quickly succumbed to US postwar reconstruction (Marshall) funds that consolidated Western Europe behind the new Pax Americana.

From the beginning, this entailed massive US interference in European politics and elections (no exceptions) and massive indoctrination from US intelligence, and from information and entertainment behemoths, sometimes in direct collusion with the CIA and other government agencies, and working in sometimes contested concert with the vassal governments.

The EU was supposedly created as a third force between the US and Soviet Union that would also reduce the risk of major intra-European conflicts.

Well, in those respects the EU was a massive failure. It has not been a third force. It has been a lap-dog to US empire. It is not the source of European unity. First of all, think Brexit. It is US penetration of Europe and US money that is the source of whatever European unity there is. Second, the unity is increasingly exposed as a myth. The tighter that Brussels stretches the corset, the angrier and more frustrated become those who stand for true independence and real sovereignty.

The EU’s main function is to siphon off the money of European citizens into a wildly expensive, unnecessary, increasingly authoritarian supra-level of government, while in addition, citizens must saddle the costs of their continuing, expensive pre-EU governments.

The EU leadership is all in a panic because the US looks like it is withdrawing from the EU scam and this will further expose the shallowness, mendacity and criminality of the entire project.

Vance was right about Europe - where, for example, even to publicly speak against Israeli genocide is to risk defamation, detention, interrogation, charges of supporting terrorism and even imprisonment.

Of course, the same is true in the US. And we don’t have to do much more than recall the shrieks of official rage over Snowden and Assange to know that free speech and the rule of law are but fantasies in the collective (now decollectivized) West.

But Vance’s admonition to Europe reinforces the message that Europe has become a debilitating drain on US wealth, allowing Europe to wallow in its self-proclaimed social security paradise while Americans have to supply most of its defense and weapons and to live, throughout much of the continent, in neo third-world conditions.

As we have seen over Ukraine, for Europe this is a game of public relations, narratives and postures behind the safety-wall of US interest (now suddenly a lack of interest).

The EU itself has been a gigantic posture. But now, something more than acting is required. Sadly, the actors only know acting and posture.

Ursula van der Leyen talks of doubling down, centralizing the EU further, building its own army, having its own money-raising powers. She wants to subject the tax-paying subjects to imperial discipline.

If the entirety of NATO was unable to win in Ukraine (or in Afghanistan or in Vietnam), how is Europe - struggling in or close to war-related recession - going to afford a new army and how is this army going to win anything other than a continuation of this pompous EU incubus around the necks of Europeans who have long been persuaded it is their mission at any expense to lift the world up to Europe’s celestial purity and magnificence.

Time to choke on the latte.