Yippy Ti Yi Yo, Europe!

NRO ^ | 22 feb 08 | Victor Davis Hanson

[rellimpank]

Neuroticism abroad.

In the last few days, we’ve been reminded yet again that Europe’s radical secularism, atheism, socialism, multiculturalism, childlessness, and aging population make a fascinating but unstable mix — a lovely, fragile orchid in a thinly protected greenhouse.

Kosovo has just declared its independence from Serbia, and what follows could be nightmarish. An oil-rich, bellicose, and rearming Russia doesn’t much like the new breakaway state. But France, Germany, and most of the European Union — other than its Orthodox members and those in close proximity to Vladimir Putin — encouraged it. To paraphrase Joseph Stalin, “How many divisions does the EU have?”

Recently Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, speaking on German soil, told cheering Turkish workers and Germans of Turkish ancestry that assimilation is "a crime against humanity" — in between demands that the European Union admit his increasingly Islamicized Turkey to full membership. The American press passed over Erdogan’s broadside, but it was a revolutionary, nationalist appeal to German residents of Turkish backgrounds, over the head of, and contrary to, the German government itself—eerily like, mutatis mutandis, Hitler’s appeal in the late 1930s to the supposedly oppressed Germans of Czechoslovakia. Meanwhile Norway is about to request 100,000 Turkish guest workers for its cash-rich but labor-poor economy. The French, however, are sighing ‘been there, done that,’ as police sweep public housing projects in the Paris suburbs looking for Muslim immigrants implicated in past riots.

The British press claims that Muslim immigrants committed over 17,000 acts of “honor” violence in Britain last year. Perhaps in response, the Archbishop of Canterbury conceded that imposition of a parallel system of sharia law in the United Kingdom might be “unavoidable.” Iran just warned Denmark to silence its newspapers, which once again are republishing caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed.

[Freee-dame]

bump

[elfman2]

bookmark

[steel_resolve]

Wait till Gazprom shuts off Europe’s gas. Then we will see what they have to say.

[neverdem]

bump & a ping

[horse_doc]

I love ya, VDH, but a Russian/Serbian squashing of Kosovo is not the nightmare.

A jihadi narco-terrorist state on Europe's doorstep is the nightmare. I'm amazed that he still thinks that Kosovo Independence is such a swell idea.

[Tolik]

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[Tolik]

If one takes the squashing of Milosevic without any context - its not a bad thing. It was beneficial to Serbs to get rid of him (they would’ve done it by themselves, sooner or later, I am sure). But, Kosovo thugs got a free ride out of it.

One usually unmentioned fact is that it was Tito’s doing to alter drastically the ethnic structure of Kosovo in favor of ethnic Albanians. Before that Kosovo was historically majority Serbian. In the 90th, for anybody not willing to invest time to understand and investigate, it was easy to pile up on Serbs, with thugs like Milosevic and Co.

Since I started paying attention to what Hanson has to say, it was always my biggest contention with him that he thought it was clearly good to kick Serbs out of Kosovo. My thoughts always were that a thug like Milosevic did deserve punishment, but not from US, from Serbs themselves. And Kosovo Albanians did not deserve any rewards, that’s for sure.

Situation like now is practically irreversible. The only thing that is possible to do is further partition Kosovo, and attach the majority Serbian part back to Serbia.

[MNJohnnie]

Has the EU preemptively surrendered yet?

[horse_doc]

Situation like now is practically irreversible.

I'm not so sure. In the context of the long-term war with Islam, Kosovo will be an active front in the next ten years.

And all those Albanians who supposedly love the USA right now, will be fighting on the side of the jihadis. Against us.

[dervish]

Thank you.

“To paraphrase Joseph Stalin, “How many divisions does the EU have?”

A gem.

[Lexinom]

Why have we made the Orhodox Christians our enemies in Serbia? Why did we bomb them on Orthodox Easter in 1999 yet go out of our way to respect Ramadan in our campaign in Afghanistan?

[stevie_d_64]

Again???

I think they are getting really good at that...

[MNJohnnie]

They might as well stay on their knees this time. They have aborted and spent themselves into such a downward spiral, there is no coming back for old Europe.

[MNJohnnie]

Not against us. We are WAY over here. The people who should be panicking are all those EU states that share the same Continent with Kosovo

[stevie_d_64]

Old Europe, New Europe, whats the difference...They live on the egde of fascism anyway...

There is almost nothing more usless than a weak fascist...And they are full of that...

[The Pack Knight]

Strictly speaking, they did get rid of him themselves. Sure, our attacks were a catalyst, but a lot of what happened was the result of internal politics.

Milosevic needed to go, and having one less Putin ally in the region is a good thing, but, by daintily refusing to do more than, as P.J. O'Rourke said, bomb the country next to where it was happening, we only managed to make an even bigger mess. Bombers are good for killing people and breaking things, and lousy for controlling what people do on the ground.

That whole sorry episode painfully highlighted the weakness of Clinton's "Peace from 30,000 Feet" World Tour. It amazes me that Wes Clark still has the chutzpah to tout that as an achievement. It serves as a valuable lesson to those who might be tempted to suggest similar solutions in Iran, Lebanon, and elsewhere.

It also highlights why we need another adult in the White House in 2009. A return to the Clinton-style statesmanship of chest-beating, cajolery, and then impotent, meandering action would be a disaster today. Hell, it was a disaster then, but I think the consequences would be tenfold as bad now.