RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/features/qed/wests-self-assisted-suicide/

EXCERPT

Instead of the leaders with iron resolve we got terribly Democratic and profoundly weak Joe Biden, a succession of the UK PMs whose names nobody can remember, former GDR Young Communist League member Angela ‘Mutti’ Merkel, ex-Secretary-General of the Portuguese Socialist Party Antonio Guterres and the ever-elegant Emmanuel Macron, addicted to long chats with Vladimir Putin. In keeping with the trend, Australia has granted itself the honour of being governed by Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong.

It seems the proudest achievement of the human species, Western Civilization, is quietly expiring under the assault of resentful and determined enemies. Sensing weakness, they are gathering for the kill. In too many instances the West facilitates its own demise, aiding and abetting those who would destroy it.

Those who are as old as I might remember big buttons proclaiming “Nuclear? No thanks”. Ubiquitous, they were a visible aspect of the unilateral disarmament campaign orchestrated by Moscow and conducted by the front organisations such as People for Nuclear Disarmament, the World Council of Churches and the like. Motivating this campaign was the Soviet fear that the Western nuclear deterrent might succeed in defeating Moscow’s conventional arms assault on Western Europe should push ever come to shove.

Now, the “protest” movement is more sophisticated – it fights for the clean environment, nothing political, you see. The neo-Marxist movement has weaponized ecology and, under the guise of saving the planet, undermines the West. They do it by posturing as “green” movements, fighting to stop fossil fuels production in the West. The result has been spectacular. We are forced to buy the necessary fuel from OPEC and Russia, countries have no homegrown protest movements which can pump oil to their hearts’ and treasuries’ content. According to the July issue of the Foreign Policy, before its assault on Ukraine, Russia was getting around $US1 billion US dollars every day in oil revenues. After the Western sanctions that figure declined to $720 million dollars per day — a decrease certainly, but still more than enough to wage war on Ukraine, finance anti-Western activities while keeping things on the homefront relatively content.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/22/the-death-pains-of-the-european-union/

The largely unspoken trade-off involved in membership of the European Union is that democracy and national sovereignty are sacrificed in return for economic prosperity. Member states give up much of their control over critical policy areas to an unelected, technocratic elite who are entrusted with delivering higher living standards and productivity. But Brussels is not keeping its part of the bargain – and hasn’t for some time.

Worse, the EU economy is about to endure decades of ‘slow agony’. This is the grim prognosis not of a Eurosceptic or populist, but of one of Europe’s most senior technocrats, Mario Draghi, the former head of the European Central Bank and ex-prime minister of Italy. Last week, Draghi unveiled a 400-page doorstopper report, commissioned by the EU, on the ‘future of European competitiveness’. Without radical economic reform, he warns, EU member states will suffer from stagnant living standards, technological backwardness and geopolitical impotence.

As Draghi’s report makes clear, the EU has been in deep economic trouble for some time now. At the turn of the century, the EU and US were on a relatively equal footing. But, on a per-capita basis, real disposable income in the EU has grown at only half the rate of the US since 2000. The US now massively outperforms the EU in advanced technology. Only four in the world’s top-50 tech firms are European. Almost a million manufacturing jobs were lost in the EU in the last four years alone. For too long, Draghi argues, policymakers have viewed the growing gap between the EU and US as merely an ‘inconvenience’, rather than the ‘calamity’ it really is.

In truth, Draghi’s bleak assessment actually underestimates the scale of the EU’s economic malaise. Looking at averages across the 27-member bloc obscures the depths of the crisis. Astonishingly, the economies of Italy, Spain and Greece, having been battered by the Euro crisis and EU-mandated austerity, are actually smaller than they were in the late 2000s. Germany, traditionally the EU’s economic powerhouse, is rapidly deindustrialising. In France, the EU’s second-largest economy, debt is spiralling to the kind of levels seen in Italy just before the Euro crisis. The cost of all this foregone growth is a diminished quality of life, stretched public services and decaying infrastructure.