Editors note: The satirical style of this essay is intentional. We believe the biggest issue in western politics is the deification of leaders, most of which are given powers they’ve never earned and placed on pedestals they don’t deserve. They’re every bit as bogus as the Oscars.
The USSR isn’t simply going away.
The EU is apoplectic about “fringe” parties coming to power in Europe, especially the Alternative for Deutschland (AFD) in Germany. The dirty little secret of the AFD though is that it’s power base is in Thuringia, an area in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) a former Soviet State.
The pussification of western Europe.
People act like European democracies are an evolution of politics. They certainly are not. Real political scientists (unlike those in universities and on TV shows) fully understand why democracies “work.” European governments, semi socialist basket cases, were designed to never make a decision. Crisis in the EU doesn’t end with a decision, it ends with a new election and the bickering starts anew.
Their superpower is the complacency of their populations.
The EU, which started out as a customs union has evolved into another level of bureaucracy on top of several other levels of bureaucracy. This means that not only are EU citizens taxed into poverty (Not to mention emigration) but they are forced to obey a rules based system so petty one wonders how the EU survives.
In this process, rank and file Europeans have become a gutless shell of what they once were.
The eastern EU shares little with the west.
To be certain, eastern Europeans are every bit as miserable as those in the west. Americans, even those who travel, don’t see this. A female friend from Prague once said, “I couldn’t believe how friendly Americans are. Once when I was in California, a guy stopped his truck hopped out and changed the flat tire on my car. Then he waved, hopped in his truck and drove away. I though he was there to rob me. That would never happen in Czechia.”
Aside from being miserable though they share little of the gay friendly political correctness you see in the west. I spend a good deal of time in Prague, Varna and Budapest but I’ve never seen a gay man there, much less a pride flag.
Eastern Europeans, including those Austria, are what I call Socialist conservatives. In turn, the best places for an expat to live in Europe are, in my well-travelled opinion, Czechia, Austria, Bulgaria and Hungary.
The EU’s Bulgaria problem.
Contrary to propaganda, prior to dissolution, Bulgaria had already privatized much of its farmland. Private farms produced more food than the collectives. But the transition to EU rules meant Bulgaria had to compete with the EU’s draconian rules and more importantly, it’s massive subsidy system.
Almost all of the net farm income in the EU comes from its subsidies. The store where I bought groceries in Varna, Bulgaria is called Kaufland. It’s a German store owned by Deiter Schwarz who also owns Lidl, as well as a shipping and logistics company, an Israeli based cyber security company and a recycling company.
Not only is Kaufland a German company, but it sells German products, as well as a large number of American products. Under-capitalized Bulgarian companies can’t compete with shipping megaliths like Schwarz Group.
The result has been a sharp drop in Bulgaria’s food production, as well as sovereignty.
This was the fate of the GDR.
Unification brought a new form of propaganda. To be sure, there are inefficiencies in socialist systems, but not everything needed to be replaced. A friend of mine in Nuremberg ran a German window company that did business in the GDR prior to dissolution. He described the inefficiency story as bullshit. (His word)
“Their windows were the same as ours. The west just wanted them out of business, so they didn’t have to compete.”
This is not an argument FOR communism.
This isn’t about economics, it’s about the politics of unification.
In systems engineering, we don’t come to simple conclusions. To understand systems, we need to look at their evolution. The act of judging is the freezing in place of something so you can stop analyzing it. In the words of Eric Fromme, “when you call something a tree, you destroy its essence.”
In other words, it’s not what it IS that matters but what’s it’s doing. Everything is constantly changing.
To say eastern Europe is behind western Europe is a judgement based on western norms. These norms were invented by governments to placate and control their populations. Real political scientists, (unlike those at universities or on TV shows) not only understand this, but use it masterfully.
Those lawn signs that say, “Love is Love,” or “No Alien is Illegal,” didn’t just magically pop up out of the ground. They were invented based on decades of experimentation. Their essence is not in what they say. They’re meaningless. But beliefs are in the eye of the believer. And just as these signs “make sense” to a small group of radicalized westerners, they are rubbish to an easterner. (In fact, they’re laughable)
Eastern Europe and western Europe are on very different paths.
Which is why the west insisted on a war with Russia.
The argument that Ukraine has value is absurd. To be sure Ukraine has vast mineral wealth, but regardless of who controls them, they will be sold on world markets at market prices. Even the taxation of it, in the form of royalties would be local, regardless of who owns the assets themselves.
The EU’s (NATO really) problem with Ukraine is that it’s too much like Russia. This is why Ukraine’s “elected” government started on the path of de-Russianizing the eastern part of their country and started introducing woke western norms.
Putin, the darling of the west when he was first elected became a pariah when he reintroduced the Russian Orthodox church into mainstream Russian life. The US countered by pushing its immigration heavy, gay rights campaigns on the EU as a form of economic blackmail.
This has created a huge cultural divide.
The east of Europe, despite it being in the throes of Soviet atheism, still has relatively strong cultures compared to the basket case west, where being a normal heterosexual couple with children is almost impossible.
One might argue that the east-west European cultural divide wasn’t planned, but to claim it doesn’t exist is absurd. To say it wasn’t planned in the US, Canada and the UK is even more absurd. The radicalization of American liberalism is way too organized to be a simply random evolution of cultural norms. From grammar school drag shows, to the gay male destruction of title 9, to marijuana being healthy, to Disney “adults,” the left, highly educated, is way too smart to be this ridiculous.
This is planned cultural destruction, and its front line is the former east bloc currently in the EU and NATO.
Russia thinks the US is a comedy show.
Much of this, including Putin’s popularity in the US is hidden from the deep state media. It’s hard for Americans to fathom just how funny Biden’s trading a ruthless Russian weapons dealer for a pot head basketball player was to the average Russian. I saw one Russian media personality with tears in her eyes she was laughing so hard.
I mention this because it shows the cultural divide between the east and west. Eastern Europeans are not like their western counterparts. As one Russian woman once asked me, “Why do American men try so hard to sound like girls.” Of course, many don’t but in liberal cities, being a gurly man is the new normal. This is what eastern Europeans seen broadcast as “America.”
Each side thinks the other side is nuts, which is exactly my point.
Europe is on the road to oblivion.
Contrary to what we might believe, Europe (As Elon Musk says) is on the road to oblivion. It lacks resources, the average age of a European is 44 and the immigrants are largely uneducated Syrians, Romanians, Turks and assorted Africans. Great if you’re making steel, but not so great if you’re competing in engineering and tech.
Of the top 50 universities in the world, only 5 are in continental Europe. (30-35 are in the USA) Even then, in the EU, with 430 million people, the best university is #33. In the top 10 NONE are in Europe. In 1920, 6 were in Europe. Humboldt University in Berlin, ranked #4 in the world in 1920 today is ranked #126.
Such are wages of socialism.
The problem with Europe is overregulation, tedious laws and massive bureaucracy, but these are for another day. One might be tempted to come up with solutions, but that would be another irrelevant “Victorian argument.”
Money flows TO universities, not from them. They’re charities. The major universities of the world are insanely unprofitable. The point is, Europe is poor and becoming more so, and in this quagmire, we are experiencing a major surge in a great unrecognized culture war.
Churchill rises from the dead.
Not to intentionally start my own war, but Church was probably the worse politician and military strategist in history. He took England in a matter of just 30 years from being the most powerful trading nation since the Roman empire to a nation whose very survival depended on donated American Spam rations. (Being drunk 7 days a week can do that to a man.)
“Spam, spam, spam, spam, wonderful spam, wonderful spam!”
We could say Joseph Biden is the new Churchill, but that would be to simplify the massive level of incompetence in the US State Department. There’s little question though that Ukraine is America’s Gallipoli. People seem to forget that the attack on Russia was designed to be economic.
Removal of Russia from the SWIFT settling system and confiscation of their bank reserves was supposed to knock them out. Instead, the EU ended up blockading themselves!
When the people of eastern Europe tire of living on lies, bizarre woke ideals and spam, they will revolt. When they revolt where will their allegiances lie? With metro-sexual dress wearing men, who carry pride flags and beat up women on soccer fields? Not likely.
To answer this question, go to Prague or Budapest.
If you had to use one word to describe Slavic men, that word would be masculine. The women are feminine. Both Prague and Budapest have wide avenues lined with huge statues of men wearing chain mail, carrying swords and sitting on horses. For example, Mrs. Trump…
As someone who has spent a good deal of time in Varna, on the Black Sea, I can assure you, there is little difference in appearance and stature between Bulgarians, Czechs, Hungarians and Russians. The pride parades that seem to pop up out of nowhere are organized by radical leftist groups from outside their countries.
In my opinion, these will continue as long as eastern Europe is fat and happy. Once they are forced to eat spam, the people will look for strong leadership and sorry culture fans, it won’t be bald men in red dresses with bright red lipstick that steal women’s luggage.
Spam now comes in a multi-flavored variety pack.
But it’s doubtful that it will placate the Slavs. The fact is, they’re being screwed by the EU. They’re asked to join a club where they are consistently treated like basement dwellers. A good example is immigration.
Just as the western EU is celebrating the onslaught of Muslim immigrants, the eastern EU is saying no ****ing way. As I mentioned above, look at the AFD in Thuringia, which was force fed immigration by Angela Merkel. (Chris Matthews once called her “The world’s chancellor.”) Also look at the president of Poland Andrzej Duda.
“We don’t need your doctors, we don’t need your engineers, take them & pay for them. We have zero terrorist attacks because we have zero tolerance of illegal immigration.” Andrzej Duda, President of Poland.
Of course, Duda said “illegal immigration,” but when spam becomes the meal of necessity Poles will not give a rat’s ass whether an immigrant is legal. Just ask the Jews.
Political “science” note: Duda has repeatedly said that Ukrainians are welcome in his country as relatives. Why? Because a large chuck of Ukraine is claimed by Poland as its territory.
How could this end?
For the record, at Landon Fillmore we don’t know how this will end. Predicting an end would go against everything we believe in. That said, a good example of how it might end, or at least begin to end is the UK.
To be sure, much of what the bloviating drunk Nigel Farage said was true. The UK was overrun with immigrants and EU bureaucracy was stifling innovation. But the EU was just another run of the mill bureaucracy on top of a rule loving bureaucracy. And the UK has had these bizarre bureaucrats WAY before the EU came around.
In fact, Charles Dickens described England perfectly in his novel “Bleak House,” a story about a disputed inheritance that took so long to settle that the estate was broke when it finally settled. Farage may have had a few things right, but like all of England’s little Churchill wannabes, he can’t distinguish winning a war from winning an argument.
To put it in more detail.
Nigel (Little Churchill) Farage fantasized that after Brexit, countries will be waiting with bated breath to join the UK’s new free trade empire. What they ended up with was a near war with France over kipper fishing rights. It never occurred to the UK that love goes in two directions.
Post Brexit, few in the EU forgot the 20 years of insults Farage dumped on them. To make matters worse, now the UK has to deal with Donald Trump, a man they not only tried to overthrow with the Steel dossier as well as sending campaign workers to the US to try and rig the election, but who could forget the floats paraded through London of Donald Trump texting from a toilet seat. For the record, kissing Trumps ass doesn’t work.
Back to the dissolution of the EU.
What makes this wildly unpredictable is the myriad of petty grievances that exists across the EU’s 26 member nations. The Slavs bickering over transgender ambassadors is small potatoes compared to a civil war in Belgium, a genocide in Kosovo or Serbia allying with the Russians.
It’s not that hard to imagine Greece realigning itself with Russia, an old friend. If the Russians take Odessa, (which they are planning on doing) the EU loses easy access to the mouth of the Danube. The rigged election in Romania will undoubtedly cause outrage with the Slavic nations and any idea of an actual democracy existing in eastern Europe in an expanded EU will wash away.
And let’s not even talk about Turkey and the lunatic Erdogan.
The idea that eastern Europe is going to agree to be a vassal state to a group of transvestites from Brussels who subsidize their own industries while screwing everybody else is, to say the least, delusional. I believe though that the fault lines (If one can predict them) could be Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Moldova, Serbia and Romania.
These are the countries that are latest to the EU party and will be the killing field in an expanded war with Russia.
And you can bet your sweet ass they know it.
