EU Chicken Hawks United, or: How the EU Stumbles into Oblivion
More weapons, more centralisation, perhaps an EU Army™ and many more dead--that's the ambition of the EU's utterly deranged political class, aided by spineless journos™ and celebrated by mad experts™
Today, we’ll explore the chicken hawks in Europe and their apparent death wish with regard to a new crusade against the hordes in the East.
As always, I recommend Dino Buzzatti’s Il Deserto dei Tartari, or The Tartar Steppe, (1940) and, perhaps more spot-on, Mario Rigoni-Stern’s Il sergente nella neve, or The Seargeant in the Snow (1953), in which the author recounts his trek home across the Ukrainian wasteland after the Italian troops outside Stalingrad were destroyed by the Red Army in late 1942/early 1943.
None of the warmongers of the present have that kind of first-hand experience (I don’t wish it upon anyone), which might explain, in part at least, their war-mongering.
Note, once more, that it is a female Labour politico™ (Mette Frederiksen) who’s once more in the forefront of this insanity.
Translation, emphases, and [snark] mine.
Mette Frederiksen: Need for Rearmament
Russia is a real threat to Europe's security, said Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen after a crisis meeting in Paris on Monday.
By Espen Alnes + 4 others, NRK, 17 Feb. 2025 [source]
A number of European heads of state gathered for a crisis meeting in Paris on Monday evening to discuss the situation in Ukraine and security in Europe.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen [she’s technically a Labour politico™] represented the Nordic and Baltic countries at the meeting:
The common European assessment is that Russia is a real threat to the security of the whole of Europe, and with it to our freedom. So the most important message from tonight is the need for rearmament [ah, the next big grift—now that the Green™ stuff isn’t really working out as wished, let’s just go back to military binge spending].
Armament will prevent Russia from shifting the war from Ukraine to other European countries [Ronald Reagan called—he’d like to get back his early 1980s PR spin (remember: ‘peace through strength’?)]
A ceasefire in Ukraine may seem better than it is in reality [I think Ms. Frederiksen has lost her marbles]. We risk a ceasefire that does not lead to peace, but puts other countries at risk because Russia uses the ceasefire to mobilise again and attack a new country [that’s a non-falsifiable hypothesis that applies, perhaps even more so, to what the US-led NATO/Coalition of the Willing has been doing…]
Too Early to Speak About Peacekeepers
In recent days there has also been talk that European countries should send peacekeeping forces to Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Sunday that they were ready to send soldiers.
After the meeting on Monday, Starmer said that the US must also give Ukraine a security guarantee [like, Art 5 of the NATO Charter?].
‘This is the only way to effectively deter Russia from attacking again’, he said [says the UK PM whose predecessor had no qualms throwing Poland and half of Europe to Stalin in 1944].
Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre (Ap) believes it is too early to discuss this while the war is still going on [top-shelf reporting™]:
There is no time to discuss it. The fact that there are meetings between the Russians and the Americans is something we will have to deal with [looks like someone’s been mean here]. Yesterday there were several signals from the US that Europe is to be included in these negotiations.
He is supported by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who said after the meeting in Paris that the debate on peacekeeping forces is now ‘premature’ and ‘highly inappropriate’, writes AFP [of course it is, for it’s not Mr. Scholz’ kids who do the dying (Olaf Scholz has no children)].
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said after the meeting that all those who attended agreed that it was necessary to co-operate closely with NATO in the future [or not, because NATO is finally revealing itself to be—a paper tiger: imagine, for a moment, what Poland would have done provided Mr. Tusk had known sending Polish troops (officially) into Ukraine would trigger Art. 5…].
He also said that many have now realised that it is time to strengthen European defence, including financially [this, however, is the money paragraph, insidiously tucked away in the lower third of the piece almost as if this is an afterthought: it means common EU bonds and bills, complete with gigatons of military spending in the next few years: see the ‘bottom lines’ for ‘more™’ than you’d ever wanted to know about this shit-show].
American Pressure Creates Challenges
On Dagsnytt 18 [evening newscast], Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide emphasised that this is a war in Europe, and that Europe must be involved in the peace negotiations [but not so much in the fighting and dying part, of course, because that doesn’t win elections]:
Because it’s our continent, and we have to live with the post-war period that will come when the war hopefully ends one day, Europe must be involved in shaping it [last time this was the case, it was in Versailles 1919/20, jus’ sayin’…].
Despite signals from the US that Europe may be left out of the planned peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, which has created unrest in Europe, Ole Martin Stormoen, researcher at NUPI [Norwegian Institute of International Affairs], points out that there would not have been a peace process without Donald Trump [enter expert™ opinion]:
President Biden would probably not be in this situation now. The Americans and Trump are pushing for this because creating so-called peace in Ukraine is high on the agenda. But it creates problems for European allies and for Ukraine [that sick comment says all about European common sense, which has long departed reality].
Stormoen adds that this gives Russia the opportunity to push for an agreement that is more favourable to them [no shit analysis; then again, Mr. Stormoen is a Ph.D. candidate who’s yet to receive his doctorate…check out his web profile, if you will, and even though NRK didn’t think that kind of information is helpful, I do think it puts this kind of ‘expertise™’ into focus].
Will not Pressure Ukraine
The foreign ministers of Russia and the USA will meet in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Tuesday [18 Feb.]. The US State Department says they will use the meeting to explore what can be achieved and whether Russia is serious, Reuters reports.
At the same time, the US special envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, is travelling to Ukraine to meet President Volodymyr Zelenskyj.
‘But the US has no plans to pressurise Ukraine to agree to a peace treaty,’ Kellogg said when he met journalists at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Monday.
Bottom Lines
It’s quite common these days, sadly, to read such blatant BS masquerading as ‘journalism™’ and ‘conventional wisdom™’. We note, it took NRK five (!!!!!) journos™ to compile this piece of…well, what exactly?
The one important message is tucked away in the lower third of the piece, in that relative clause ‘including financially’, which means, in effect, that whatever ‘investment’ is forthcoming, will be declared fully in line with whatever PR spin (‘war is peace’) will be spouted from the top of Eurocrats’ lungs:
Fortunately, what the EU means isn’t that member-states could actually go to war against anyone stronger than, say, Aruba (no offence; I’m a wee bin unsure EU countries could deploy there, though), but that investment in military goods and services—think: illegally hiring consultants on the public dime, about which Ms. Von der Leyen knows all about—is now classified as ‘sustainable™’ and fully in line with whatever moronic ESG rules in place.
Moreover, doing their expectable shenanigans, this was done by bending the EU Treaties (which do not permit using common EU funding to be funnelled towards military spending), the trick here, most likely, is to set up common EU Bills & Bonds to use debt, created out of thin air via the Bundesbank’s acquisition and clearing window to circumvent the other relatively clear wording of the Treaties:
So, will ‘we’ go to war against whoever? I don’t know—let’s hope the grown-ups sort this one out before the wayward teens get too uppity and wreck the party for everybody. Earlier this year, Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán disclosed that the Eurocrats were already discussing the introduction of compulsory EU (military) service:
The saving grace here are—the proverbial lessons of history.
It took Adolf Hitler and his willing collaborators among the German officer caste some years to build up the Wehrmacht to, ultimately, something around 300 divisions (units of approx. 12,000 soldiers).
As the German-language version of that piece notes, 10 years after Hitler took over Germany (Nov. 1943), the Wehrmacht had 6.345m soldiers under arms, of whom some 3.9m served on the Eastern Front.
The Bundeswehr currently (Nov. 2024) has some 180K active-duty soldiers, of whom ‘24,726 are women’; of the total, some 2,000 are deployed.
Yet, the Army (Heer) has only some 61K soldiers (not all of whom are front-line troops), the Airforce (Luftwaffe) some 27K, and the Navy (Marine) some 15K; there are 20K medics and the share of women ranges between 7-11% of these numbers.
So, if the above piece scares or annoys you, remember: the Wehrmacht fielded some 3.9m soldiers vs. the Soviet Union and still lost.
And we don’t know if the young men of Europe would last as long as their forefathers once the shooting starts.
In other words: the saving grace here is that it’ll take more than some stupid talk, and way longer than a few years, to get Europeans to form armies that can be deployed.
And, thankfully, this means—as everybody knows, I assume—that what comes out of European politicos™’ mouths is but hot air.
Lastly, speaking of hot air, here’s what passes for ‘conventional wisdom™’ among Germany’s educated professorial caste (hi there, fellow Eastern European Studies professor at the Viadrina U, Frankfurt/Oder; Wikipedia)
Now, I don’t know if he did military service (his bios are mum about this), but I’d support the notion to draft these kinds of warmongers and ship them off to the front lines.
I just re-read All Quiet on the Western Front. To this day, it is one of the scariest books I have ever read - it makes my physically ill to read it is that graphic. I am at a total loss for words regarding the people who are advocating warfare.
Every European nation has a large contingent of foreign invaders inside its borders.
But handling them requires re-arranging the internal political compass, which can't be done since some points of that compass have been hard-coded "nazi" and the population and politicos conditioned to think "deporting criminals equals nazi".
All that subconsciously registered anger, fear and frustration over being invaded and under occupation must find outlet however sublimated or projected.
Enter Russia.
And thus, pouring resources we cannot do without and have great difficulty in replacing becomes not only possible but a duty.