EXPLAINER: Why Europe lacks voice, power in Ukraine crisis

Scarred by losing tens of millions of lives on their soil in two world wars, many European Union nations have been wary ever since about military spending.

Now, as Russian pressure builds at the Ukrainian border, they face a painful reality: Europe remains heavily reliant on U.S. might to deter another potentially big conflict on its turf.

Because of a half-hearted attitude to defense and security over decades, “the EU has almost nothing to bring to the table,” says Piotr Buras, senior policy fellow at the European Council of Foreign Relations think tank. “So, Russia can simply ignore it.”

No slight intended, definitely not but... Russia and China were among the victor nations, and neither were they occupied for years or de-militarized.

Another problem was the media after 1945 were deliberately stocked with leftists, all non-leftists having been compromised in the twelve dark years before.

Or being dead. If a nation of 80 million loses 5 million men of military age from 14 to 65 and nearly 2 million civilians, the effect will in any way be drastic.

The most acute loss was, next to the Jews, many of whom had been amongst our best, that of those men and women executed for acts of resistance.

Many of them could have, and would have, been an excellent “sourdough” for building a new, better Germany, imho. With more common sense, which isn’t common any more, as a fellow Freeper used to say, whose name eludes me at the moment.

Lord have mercy.

Furthermore, the internationalist-minded power elite likes to keep the country supine and defenseless, using the past to beat the present-day population on the head, lest they get too uppity.

Weaponizing the past? Hmmmm...doesn’t this story sound somehow familiar?

What you say is broadly true……yet it wasn’t the case until the rotten 68ers came to power. The Bundeswehr was no joke up through the 80s. It was also funded reasonably. Germany was a mostly socially conservative country that was clean, efficient and had low crime. (Ordnung muss sein!)

A LOT of the rot I see in America today reminds me of things I saw in Germany in the 90s and beyond……by then the 68ers were largely in charge. The hordes of petty unelected bureaucrats, the massive over regulation and taxation, The politicians and media and heads of big businesses all being in bed together United against the middle class, the not undemocratic but actually anti democratic impulse the elites had……what is the EU but an elite driven anti democratic project? The immediate labeling of ANY dissent as (scare quotes) “right wing”. ANY expression of national pride or indeed pride in one’s own heritage and culture was immediately greeted with the most hysterical screams of “it will be World War III!!!! They want to drag us all back to the trenches!!!!!”)

A lot of this wallowing in regret, doubt, self loathing, lack of cultural self confidence……..ie Vergangenheitsbewaltigung….is actively cultivated by the elites and their propaganda arm the media as a hammer to be used against domestic political opponents. It also makes for a convenient excuse to shirk NATO responsibilities…..ie to be one big Drueckeberger

Thank you very much for your words. I couldn’t agree more.

You absolutely nailed it :-)

I am just so sorry that this cancer you describe has spread to the USA, too - but I believe anyway that all this rot is an international problem, like a system of communicating vessels, facilitated by international exchange of bad ideas.

Take the leftism in academia: it started with the deleterious ideas of Gramsci and the Frankfurt School.
No later than the members of the latter had been so graciously taken in by the USA after ‘33, they turned upon their host country and spread their poison there.
They spawned many epigones, who were instrumental in causing the student riots of the mid-Sixties. From there all of it went back to Europe, where it spread its toxic shoots, gathering even more strength in the process.
Now it seems the whole rot is coming back to North America, finding followers there as well...

It looks, at least to these humble eyes, just like a dreadful ping-pong game...

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