“Performative” surely is the political cliché of our times. Yet nonetheless it is the only word that describes the vapid behaviour of so many western societies. These seem dedicated to the concept that the only decent and respectable thing they can do is to commit suicide by swallowing indigestible quantities of virtue. No day in the calendar states this more acutely, or highlights the humbug to which the EU and Canada have so zealously dedicated themselves, than last Sunday’s performative Holocaust commemorations. What these had in common was a denunciation of the Holocaust along with a complete inability to prevent another one.
Such hypocrisy was only possible because Europe’s “intelligentsias” – and seldom are inverted commas so thoroughly deserved – have been preaching the heresy that there is nothing inherently good or virtuous or noble about western values. The West was born of exploitation and expropriation, goes this lie, and should admit its sinfulness by giving sanctuary to all strangers fleeing their homelands. This self-destructive nonsense has resulted in the mass immigration of peoples with no cultural, racial or religious connection with Europe. Wherever local electorates have rebelled – as they in many places – a self-appointed body of experts in the media, judiciaries and civil services have simply overpowered them with imperial ukases – like “performative”, a vital word for these times. It is Russian, and implicitly means that the tsars – who personally embodied God’s will and wisdom – always knew how to protect the interests of the governed people.
So, too, do Europe’s mandarin classes, which additionally, by annually invoking the horrors of the Third Reich, throw a substitute religion to their electorates. This insinuates that opposing mass immigration is morally not very different from the Holocaust, so making critics of governments’ immigration policies the modern equivalent of the SS.
What is the country about which the word “genocide” is most used today? Israel, of course, whose forces have been fighting Hamas for nearly two and a half years. Is it not rather surprising that Israel had not yet occupied the whole Gaza Strip or defeated Hamas? In a comparable period, the armies of the Third Reich had brought their Final Solution to the Crimea, about 1,600 kilometres from Berlin, and killed several million Jews. Yet the term “genocide” is used to describe both operations.
Ah, but that overlooks Gaza’s unique position as the most densely populated part of the world! Not so. It has 6,000 people per square kilometre. Tokyo has 6,340 and lucky Jakarta has 16,154. So, the only way comparisons are possible is by an abandonment of all historical knowledge and employing a verbal elasticity that makes nonsense of any dictionary. That the operations against Gaza have produced horrific casualties is indisputable. But this war was started by Hamas very carefully mimicking the genocidal deeds of a Nazi einsatzkommando. Those who freely use the word “genocide” about Israel are obliged to say what it should actually do to deal with Hamas, a specifically and proudly genocidal force. But then so too is Hamas’s temporary Lebanese “ally”, Hezbollah, which of course belongs to to a rival Islamic faction. Within this alliance, each side hopes sooner or later to inflict a final solution upon its rival. An interesting prospect indeed, not least for those European countries which have imported millions of Muslims, and which might one day be fortunate enough to host their own local versions of the Sunni-Shia conflict.
How could such insanity have been made possible? Good question. Equally, how could two of the worlds great Christian metropolises, New York and London, be governed by Muslim mayors? What insanity allowed 15 million illegal immigrants into the USA, when Biden was President, and his idiot of a Vice President, Harris, was his Border Czar? That very term returns us to Europe’s elites and their boundless appetite for multicultural sanctimony. For, far from erecting defences against internal demographic subversion, these have actively lured immigrants from around the world into – yes, here comes that word again, but now as adjective – insane welfare states.
Who was Europe’s hero at the annual farce at Davos? Canada’s Mark Carney of course, for a speech dripping with the kind of sanctimony that has made the EU an ungovernable joke. His simpering invocation of a rules-based world order that had existed before Trump required a sickly swamp of untruth and humbug. The “rules-based order” was in fact Magna Carta for a voracious tapeworm, by which the taxpayers of the USA underwrote the defence of Europe, which meanwhile built the world’s largest welfare system.
Carney was well positioned to speechify such gibberish, being Canadian, British and Irish, thereby embodying the the hypocrisy of all three societies. The least guilty of this blessed trinity is Canada, despite the astonishing damage done to the fabric of that country by the worst prime minister in its history, Justin Trudeau. Next comes Britain, whose immigration policies have been so suicidal that some half dozen of its cities are now essentially foreign, most particularly London, its capital, Birmingham and Leicester. But amid all the pious hogwash that has so corrupted its judiciary, its civil service, its armed services and perhaps most of all the BBC, at least it still aspires to defend itself, if only vaguely.
This cannot be said of the third element of Carney’s identity, his ancestral homeland of neutralist Ireland, which is proudly not a member of NATO and last year elected as both President and commander in chief of its armed forces a woman who is opposed to states having any armies. Ireland spends more on foreign aid than it does on defence, even though it “guards” the EU’s western flank. But of course, it does no such thing: It has no warships even capable of protecting the off-shore cables that make its entire economy possible, no air force at all and an army that would be hard to repel an attack by the halberdiers of the Vatican’s Swiss Guards. Yet its consensually sanctimonious media and political classes daily suffocate on their own saintly goo, which they ooze like the protective saliva of cuckoo-spit. Unsurprisingly, Ireland’s Taoiseach, or prime minister, Micheál Martin, is in the forefront of EU countries denouncing Israel for its “genocide” in Gaza. So, given the high moral tones with which Ireland endlessly addresses the world, its thumbs smugly behind its lapels, what has it ever done to end, limit or forestall genocide anywhere?
Answer: a single digit resembling an egg.
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.
Western freedom is heading for the crocodile’s pantry shelf