Member-only story
Dithering To Disaster
Why Europe continues to fail to take action to protect itself against Russia
We’ve just had the latest Munich Security Conference occur at the same time Alexey Navalny was murdered by Putin’s goons in one of Russia’s gulags and Russian forces finally stormed the town of Avdiivka thanks to US Republican actions in blocking all aid to Ukraine. Meanwhile the sniveling moron Trump is now on record as saying to his adoring mindless worshippers with regard to NATO allies, “No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them (Russian forces) to do whatever the hell they want.”
Given Europe’s total inability to defend itself and given the USA’s terminal dysfunction and inexorable slide into fascist dictatorship, and given Putin’s stated intent to re-create the old Russian Empire by reconquering Romania, Poland, Finland, Sweden, the Baltic states, and at least half of Germany, you’d think European leaders at the MSC would recognize that the hour is late and the threat is overwhelming and therefore they would act decisively in an attempt to create some kind of European defensive capability.
But if you thought any of that, you’d be wrong.
Representative democracy is a system whereby ignorant empty-headed people get to vote for unqualified blustering imbeciles on the basis of who happens to be promising them the most metaphorical free ice-cream while blaming everyone else for whatever problems happen to be currently most prominent in the sensation-mongering mass media that masquerades as “news.”
Not surprisingly, this unfit-for-purpose system results in the election of “leaders” whose ability to lead is zero but who have the superb ability to spin meaningless actions like arguing over the placement of a comma in a communiqué no one will ever read and promising some magical future that won’t come into being until long after they’ve retired or died and therefore won’t be held to account for their empty promises.
Our attachment to qualification-free democracy means that we have zero capacity to take meaningful action even when existential threats are so great that it’s evident they will shortly overwhelm us and destroy everything we care about.
