by FRED PAWLE – IS THERE no problem in the world that European leaders – and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese – can’t make worse?
The European Commissioners – who two months ago were building a new renewable energy grid to save the planet from overheating – have overnight pivoted to establishing a A$1.4b industry producing bombs, ammunition and military equipment to save Ukraine.
- Opposing all three, as ordinary people do, simply requires common sense.
- PM Albanese has defied our key military ally and signed up for the “coalition of the willing”.
- “Willing to do what?”
Perhaps in deference to yesterday’s existential threat, the European Commissioners can assure us that the carbon footprint of all this exploding hardware will be offset with tree seedlings planted in Donbas once the firing stops and the Russians have been sent home in ambulances and bodybags.
That none of the EC luminaries suffered whiplash from this rapid volte-farce can be attributed to none of them having spines.
MATRIARCH
European Commission matriarch Ursula von der Leyen has gone from telling the World Economic Forum in January that “next-generation clean-energy technologies” were her highest priority to announcing in Brussels last week: “We are in an era of rearmament” and “the urgency is real”, which is why she plucked a handy €800b out of thin air to make it happen.
If my guess is correct, EC apparatchiks are at this very minute on the phone to Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and Audi offering massive subsidies to convert their vehicle production lines – which were recently made redundant by cheaper Chinese imports – to producing tanks and troop carriers instead.
It would be a good chance for the car makers to negotiate a carve-out from EC diktats forcing them to power their operations with rooftop solar panels.
After all, meeting von der Leyen’s “urgent” deadline might be difficult if there is an unseasonal rise in cloudy days blocking light to the solar panels this northern summer.
Sadly, ordinary punters don’t have the same bargaining position. They will be paying for these armaments and sending their young men off to the war whether they like it or not.
The latest poll out of Europe says they don’t. A survey for The Times and YouGov in Britain found that only 11 per cent of Gen Z, aged 18 to 27, were proud enough of their country to fight for it. One imagines even fewer would fight to defend Ukraine.
European leaders speak of defending Europe’s “security”, but are careful not to conflate that with “freedom”.
The mere mention of the word would elicit audible sniggers from the thousands of people across the continent and the UK currently doing time for daring to publicly contradict the woke agenda of high immigration and subjugation to Islam, and all the violent crime and social fragmentation that entails.
RUBBING
The people who are advocating for this war are conspicuously the same people who exactly five years ago were rubbing their hands together in excited anticipation of locking us in our homes and, soon afterwards, coercing us to be injected with an experimental gene therapy.
The cost of that contrived crisis was billions of dollars and the lives of tens of thousands of (mostly young) people, the benefits from which were minuscule, if they existed at all.
The defence of Ukraine will one day be measured in a similarly tragic deficit. As anyone outside the EU dictators and the media can see, Russian troops are as much a threat to western Europeans in 2025 as COVID was to healthy people in 2020.
By trying to negotiate a deal to end the war with Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump has been lampooned in the media as kowtowing to a Russian dictator.
The same media routinely lionises Winston Churchill while ignoring that Churchill also collaborated with a Russian despot, Joseph Stalin, to defeat Nazism in World War II.
Stalin makes Putin look like Mahatma Ghandi, yet Trump is, according to the geniuses in the media and political elite, the naive one.
PM Anthony Albanese has defied our key military ally and signed up for the “coalition of the willing”, according to British PM Keir Starmer.
As Frank Furedi says on Substack today: “Willing to do what?”
“At a time when neither France nor Britain can secure their borders to prevent mass illegal migration, their willingness to be willing will be truly tested,” Furedi says.
WINDBAGS
“Macron and his colleagues may well be good at acting the role of would-be Napoleon Bonapartes. But these windbags are not in a position to seriously affect the outcome of the war in Ukraine.
“As matters stand, only the US has the resources and the military-technological capacity to significantly influence the outcome of this war.”
The media and the political elite have their heads so far up their own behinds that they can’t see how Trump’s pragmatic and positive strategies appeal to ordinary people who are sick of war-mongering and endless government expenditure.
The war in Ukraine is just a repeat of the war on climate change and the war on COVID. Supporting all three, as the elites have done, requires, to put it politely, extraordinary intellectual elasticity. Opposing all three, as ordinary people do, simply requires common sense.PC
– Fred Pawle
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