‘Civilisational erasure’ and ‘transgressive decay’ indeed befalling Europe

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently declared that the rules-based alliance of normative values once binding the US and Europe had come to an end, posing unprecedented challenges for his country. 

“What we once called the normative West no longer exists in this form….At best, it is still a geographical designation, but no longer a normative bond that holds us together.”

Sorry, Herr Chancellor, but there was no such “normative bond” between Europe and the US: There was simply a benign conquest of Europe by the US that never spelled out quite why the military head of NATO was always an American. This was the equivalent of droit de seigneur for a series of US four-star generals. Thus the fiction was maintained that Europe was a militarily respectable entity, when it was no such thing, and it has taken the crushing victory of the F-35 in the livery of half a dozen European countries to reveal the reality  that Europe is still a joke. There is no European rival to the F-35, and with the US Army and Air Force ordering a million battlefield drones, there is no prospect of Europe ever being able to match the USA in any department of war. 

Likewise, the belief that the European component of NATO might unassisted be able to meet, match and despatch a Russian land-invasion is a fantasy. With perhaps the exception of the Scandinavian and Baltic countries, no European country is in any way close to facing the political reality of a Russian army parking its tanks on their front lawns and helping themselves to the contents of their pantries.

Merz and Trump both know that the latter was right when he recently spoke of the  “civilisational erasure” that is befalling Europe. (Befalling? Befallen!). Brussels Signal has repeatedly warned of the collapse of civil values across the EU,  the UK and Ireland,  with some of the most egregious failures being evident in the final two political entities, with the wretchedly defenceless Republic of Ireland not being a member of NATO and the UK  now being outside the EU. 

What is most evident within the UK has been a pathological childishness that makes any prospect of the country ever becoming a useful military ally now simply absurd. This is not just the product of the abysmal Labour government of recent vintage, but has roots going back deep into the 1990s, during which time most of the really deadly and irreversible rot occurred under the Tories. At the core of this decay has been the installation of what the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in Washington (quoting Roger Scruton) recently called “oikophobia”, the loathing of one’s own values and their replacement by imported or transgressive alternatives, which are then loudly celebrated as being superior.

It might seem a trifle otiose to mention Oscar Wilde here, whereas the cynical use to which that tragic figure has been put is a perfect example of transgressive decay. Far from Wilde being a victim of a strangely reactionary set of obsolete laws, he would today throughout much of the EU be convicted and possibly imprisoned for the same offences as those for he was convicted in 1895. These included paid sexual relations with twelve male prostitutes. Across Europe, the implementation of the “Swedish” law criminalising the purchase of sexual services would make Wilde’s activities in 2025 as illegal as they were 1895. Yet the latest production of The Importance of Being Ernest celebrates both the play and Wilde as if this were not the case.

Moreover, the production at the Noel Coward Theatre wallows in all those ghastly tropes that make theatre-going today so very tiresome. The part of Lady Bracknell is played by Stephen Fry, with that fey and leaden cumbrousness that has become his defining hallmark. Algernon Moncrieff is played by a conspicuously gay Olly Alexander, while Ernest is played by Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, who is of African origin, complete with dreadlocks. It is, needless to say, a celebration of “queerness”. This, mark you, for a play that is set in the era of High Victoriana. In other words, these clowns are celebrating a lie. 

Meanwhile. Britain’s best-selling children’s author, David Walliams,  has been terminated without warning but with extreme prejudice by the incoming MC of HarperCollins publishers, Kate Elton, even though he has sold nearly 26 million books. A junior and unnamed employee alleged that he had harassed her, and she duly left with a five-figure settlement in damages. Walliams’ agent denies any allegations of “inappropriate behaviour” – though of course these days we are never told quite what constitutes “appropriate behaviour”. What is clear is that in 2025, a great many women – by their own assessments – are incapable of defending themselves without recourse to non-legal and purely discretionary proceedings that depend for their potency entirely on a fusion of inference and victimhood.

What was absent throughout the Walliams affair was that frail little plant known as L-A-W. This, indeed, has been a defining characteristic of much of post-COVID Europe, in which non-judicial expediency has served as as an easy substitute for due process. This was mostly emphatically the case for how the EU rustled together the financial wherewithal to continue Ukraine’s struggle against Russia, based on the entirely illusory   reparations that the latter “owes” to Ukraine.

“The financial package for Ukraine has been finalised,” said Merz, which he then redefined as: “Ukraine is granted a zero-interest loan… to cover the military and budgetary needs of Ukraine for the two years to come…..If Russia does not pay reparations we will — in full accordance with international law — make use of Russian immobilised assets for paying back the loan.”

This is almost hilarious. Quite simply, Russia will not be paying reparations to anyone. That is not Russia’s way: Not to Poland in 1939, not to Poland in 1945, not to Poland in 1989, and certainly neither to Poland nor Ukraine in 2025-6-7. Indeed, at the moment, Russia is busy sowing discord between Poland and Ukraine so sedulously that within a few months’ time almost nobody will remember the fictional “reparations” that underwrote the EU’s phoney bill-of-credit as a Christmas present to Ukraine. But likewise, who will remember Merz’s blathering about normative values, or David Walliams’s cancellation or the execrable version of The Importance of Being Ernest?  These merely confirm that we are living in truly trivial, truly forgettable times. 

Roll on ’26, please.

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.