Europe as a political, cultural and economic entity does not deserve to survive. That it is still afloat, and its populations are not being eaten by the orcas of an unforgiving history, is largely due to the amnesia of the American political classes. These morons completely forgot that the US was squandering fortunes maintaining garrisons in the defence of a smugly lazy continent that richly deserved to be an al fresco lunch for Russia’s Third Shock Army. But Eastern Europe always knew that its morning sun rises over the steppes of Asia, from which have repeatedly emerged the threats to our Christian Caucasian collection of civilisations.
Germany was aware of this, though the eight decades of its western provinces being within a US protectorate largely clouded that memory. Its superb motor industry similarly concealed Germany’s deplorable inability to produce a capable fighter-aircraft. How was this remotely possible for a country that is so technologically sophisticated, and was once the home of the majestic FW 190 and Messerschmitt 109? In large part because of the perpetual presence of the US, but also because a slothfully pious pacifism infused the political cultures of almost all European states. This not merely deplored violence but also condemned any common preparation to fight a war, which of course is the surest way to invite a bully not merely through your front door, but sooner or later, also into your connubial bed. Moreover, Europe’s uncanny ability to put regionalised national interests over the future of the union overall has not just been a besetting sin, but also a defining one.
The inability/refusal of European states to create a coherent defence policy means that the EU now has three different fourth-generation interceptor/strike fighters, with three different engines and three different sets of avionics – the equivalent of the Czar mounting his cavalry on horses, oxen and camels at Borodino. Europe solved this little conundrum by (rather ingeniously) not having a fifth-generation fighter, unlike the Russians and Chinese, one each, and the US, two, while even the Turks are working on a rather crude one, a sort of airborne Istanbul in a china shop. The EU will no doubt stoutly defend its fields and its skies with armour-plated stealth resolutions and surface-to-air, heat-seeking draft-agendas.
Yep. You got this, Brussels.
So deep had the moral decay of unarmed pacifism sunk into the mainstream of European culture that when the co-founder of the music-streaming service Spotify, Daniel Ek, chose to invest €100 million in the German defence contractor, Helsing, Spotify users whinnied in horror, with some artists demanded a boycott of Ek’s music streaming service. In other words, the Mickey Mouse inanities of the nursery had captured the army’s cadet-training college.
In terms of defence, Europe had nothing, Torsten Reil, co-founder of Helsing, told The Financial Times last weekend. “And I felt that was a massive vulnerability,” which was putting it mildly. It is also a reminder that while Europe and the US remain in competition, the personal, cultural and economic ties also make the two inseparable. The German-American Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal, Founders Fund and Palantir, truly embodies this conflict/fusion, while continuing a worthy tradition that brought victory in 1945. The German-American James Kindelberger designed the North American P-51 Mustang, which won the air war over Germany. Another German-American Fred Reutscher founded Pratt and Whitney company that made the engines which powered the Liberator bombers that the P-51 was escorting. The latter also protected the B-17 bombers made by the company started by the German American William E. Boeing. In other words, the defeat of the Third Reich was made by possible by the German demographic within the USA. (The mother of the Wright brothers who began it all was Susan Koerner, another German-American who infused her sons with an enthusiasm for engineering and mathematics.)
Furthermore, Thiel’s company Palantir is a human node that connects many IT pioneers, who almost all have Stanford on their CVs. If Europe is to try to keep pace with – it will never overtake – the US, it must create the equivalent of Silicon Valley. Perhaps the logical home for a European node would be in France, on the Paris-Saclay hub, or the region of France adjoining Geneva, the home of CERN. However, Munich would doubtless stake a claim. This is Helsing’s headquarters, formed after Reil teamed up with Gundbert Scherf, a former defence ministry official and Niklas Köhler, an AI researcher. (This is, however, not Munich’s first foray into defence. The city’s BMW, and the monstrous Quandt family, had a vital role in the Final Solution, with the murder-by-toil of many thousands of slave-labourers – a useful reminder of the possibly terminal consequence of disarmament).
Helsing’s original goal was to create an AI-enabled platform to synthesise and analyse battlefield data and improve the speed and quality of military decision making. “We started a defence company with a feeling of ‘If we don’t do this, then no one else will,’” Reil said.
Quite so. Back in those sinisterly innocent days, most European venture capital investors regarded the defence industry as being akin to one of Herod’s more unpleasant schemes. Moreover environmental, social and governance rules prevented many investment funds putting money into such “lethal” businesses. It was this toxic sanctimony that caused Daniel Ek so much trouble. The first serious wake-up call came after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The German chancellor Olaf Scholz captured the tone in his celebrated Zeitenwende speech of three years ago, as well as supplying a useful reminder of how stating the blindingly bloody obvious after decades of mind-numbing silliness can then seem like a penetrating Aristotelian wisdom: “We are living through a watershed era. And that means that the world afterwards will no longer be the same as the world before.”
Wow, Olaf. More, please.
“The issue at the heart of this is whether power is allowed to prevail over the law. Whether we permit Putin to turn back the clock to the nineteenth century and the age of the great powers. Or whether we have it in us to keep warmongers like Putin in check. That requires strength of our own.”
In fact, that “requirement” did not come quite so blindingly bloody obvious to most of Europe until the re-election of Donald last November. Indeed, it was the threat that he posed to Europe, as much as that by Putin, which radically transformed the perceptions within all EU capitals. Moral and political leadership of the post-watershed EU almost certainly lies with Germany – which is why it is mystifying that so many people insist on calling what is clearly a governing party of the future, the AfD, “far-right”. To be sure, there are some deeply unpleasant people in the party, as there are in most political parties. Few people (I am one) would call any Green party, “far-left”, though that is exactly what most are in their moral capitulation to anti-capitalism and de-industrialisation
Reil views the AfD with grave suspicion, while being convinced that it will not come to power. Why on earth would he say that? It captured 21 per cent of the vote in the last general election. If some of the EU’s more insane projects (see later) reach fruition, the AfD will certainly be in government. Could Helsing really refuse to sell its drones to the legally-constituted government in its own country? Reil told The Financial Times, that if the AfD came into government, it would be a “real problem”.
How is that a problem? AfD is a law-abiding and accountable democratic party. Moreover, according to Reil’s supine equivocations, if the German people voted it into government, this quite clearly would not be just a problem for Germany, but for all of Europe. Our defences are increasingly held in common. They cannot be left to squeamish multiculturalists who think that identity is merely a form of encoded racism, not least because such strictures only apply to Caucasians. No sane person would denounce the racial make-up of a Zulu impi, or of flower-arranging Samurai warriors or an icefloe of Eskimo seal-harpooners.
Such racial self-disdain is not confined to Reil. The European Parliament’s Civil Liberties (LIBE) committee recently approved the Commission’s proposal to allow at least seven million additional labour migrants – mostly Africans – into the Union by 2030. Oh yes indeed, the same paradisal year that the EU also becomes carbon neutral! So, what is the civil liberties committee going to call this population transfer? LIBESraum? Have its members read a single newspaper in the past two decades? If there is one way to ensure that AfD could form a single-party government in Berlin, then this is it. And what experienced immigration-czar will the EU appoint to mastermind this demographic wonder-project? Joe Biden? Still, it’s a useful reminder that within Brussels there still beats a heart of such dumbfounding stupidity as to justify a discreet insulin injection directly into a cardiac vein, followed by a midnight burial with clothbound spades. That done, we control immigration and arm ourselves properly.
Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.
Armies that do real fighting do not employ women as infantry or submariners