The Block of the Blockheads

Europe and the UK are determined to be the world’s biggest losers

Once upon a time the last great Englishman told us all how an Iron Curtain had descended across the continent of Europe, neatly dividing the Free from the Conquered, the Capitalist from the Communist, and the Good from the Evil.

Churchill’s rhetoric was of course better than that of anyone else alive at the time, and far better than my description above suggests too. And it was blessed, made significantly more convincing, by at least initially being true.

The Free World was indeed freer than the Soviet Union and the nations of the Warsaw Pact. That two word invention, Iron Curtain, brilliant captured multiple things. It suggested the vast ranks of Soviet guns, tanks and missiles. These were the ‘iron’ in the curtain. It suggested too what a curtain does-blocking out the light, consigning one side to darkness. On our side, the bright freedom, on the other side, shadows and the fear that grows in darkness.

There is a beautiful poetic efficiency in the phrase, a terse encapsulation of an entire set of suggestions.

Today, the hope that was widespread when that Iron Curtain fell seems like a very distant memory, in many ways more distant than the constantly re-evoked World War that preceded it. When the Soviet system fell and one after another of the former Russian satellites and conquered Eastern European and Baltic nations detached themselves, the narrative seemed both simple and complete.

Here endeth the Cold War. Long live the Free World.

In reality, by the time of the Soviet Union’s final collapse, things were not nearly so clear cut. It was true that the Communist regimes were foul, but by the end they were also impossibly feeble, so riddled with absurdities that they were no longer to be feared, but mocked. The entire system had become like one of its least impressive heads, a late addled Brezhnev, a faltering Andropov, like a corpse paraded on the balcony and held up with wires and string, less animate and bold and relevant even than the waxen face of Lenin behind his glass sarcophagus. Gorbachev was a curiously out of place final figure, animated and amused, capable of a jollity not seen in Soviet leaders since Uncle Joe’s more psychopathic version.

Incidentally, as an aside, there is a whole mode of humour that is quintessentially Russian and that Putin possesses at times (he doesn’t use it that often, it glimmers in the background) in a way that’s little remarked on, a morbid drollness which is like the cynical older brother of English irony. Russians are now both much more serious than their Western European opponents, and much more aware of ironies and hypocrisies the way a satirist is, more aware of the comedy of postures that is late stage western morality than we are.

What made Russians laugh about the late Soviet Union, what made them snort with derision about the lies of their own tyrants, is precisely what makes Putin snort a little when talking about us. Russians know too well what it looks like when a weak man or a broken system pretends to strength. They smell the lie as much as hear it. They had it endlessly in the last decades of Soviet incompetence and inertia, and they can see it as clear as day in our Globalist directed nations.

We remind them of Soviets, most especially when we are the ones pretending the Cold War never ended or that Putin is still in the KGB. Our lies are both transparent and absurd, on everything from the morality of our foreign policy to the nature of a man and a woman, and Russians see that and know what it means. It means that we are failing. It means that we are weak and foolish.

We obsess endlessly over the fact that Russians built a tyranny of ever more ridiculous lies, but we forget they were also the suffering victims and the determined opponents and finally the laughing conquerors of that system of lies. The arms race and the stern western opposition and US economic might and cultural attraction all broke the Soviet Union…but so did ordinary Russians, over very many years, by increasing doubt, increasing contempt, and by jokes and sneers before strikes and riots and marches.

Russians know the difference, more than anyone, between real strength and its absence.

The break between the West and East comes not so much because Putin is a madman or bent on world conquest or even would rather like to restore the Tsarist or mid Soviet borders and spheres of influence of Russia, as it comes because WE keep insisting that the events of today should be viewed solely as a repetition of something else. We are the ones trapped in the past, not Russia. Russia and Putin when historical causes are discussed at least know their own history, at least reach back before their own birth. We apply 1939 endlessly, again and again, as if that isn’t ridiculous. Or we apply the Cold War, again and again, as if nothing has changed and more particularly our power and their weakness were both fixed, just like our Goodness and their Evil.

The fact that our leaders are considerably less good than they used to be, our causes considerably muddier, and our reach and power as reduced as Russia’s has been restored under Putin, escapes us. But it doesn’t escape the Russians.

What they share in common with Trump, MAGA and blue collar Americans who would rather fix the problems at home is not evil, as European and British snobs and leaders would suggest, but realism. And that realism can see what a tottering mess Western Europe really is.

The truth is that the life of the ‘international rules based order’, the thing that we are supposed to worship and love and wish to preserve, the thing which comes with vast Soviet style bureaucracies such as the UN and the EU, even the concept of the Free World meaning an Anglosphere with Western Europe attached, has been around just a little longer than the Soviet Union existed for. The Soviet Union lasted 69 years. From the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957 the EEC/EU has been with us for 67 years. The UN is slightly more venerable at 80 years of age. NATO is 75 years old.

In other words, all of these things which we are supposed to consider so necessary that existence without them cannot possibly be contemplated, all of these things which we are supposed to imagine the world could not exist without, all of these things for which we are supposed to be eager to go to war with Russia, have existed about the same length of time as Joe Biden or Donald Trump or the oldest leaders of the former Soviet Union.

This rules based order set up in the rubble of the end of WWII is not the natural state of affairs. It was an artificial creation fitted to the already missed problems of the 1930s, coming fully into being in the 1950s, and parasitically dependent from its first moment of existence on the United States of America. The UN is housed in New York. The US gives the greatest financial contribution. NATO’s budget, likewise, is 70% supplied by the US. In 2024 the US had over 100,000 troops stationed in Europe. This year it stands at 84,000. This commitment to the defence of Europe, with Europe as a near helpless dependent that takes the US military umbrella while blaming the US for any raindrops that fall, is also in its 80s.

I think it’s actually a good mental exercise to picture this commitment, these institutions, this system that is now demanding we go to war with Russia and demanding we worship Ukraine and Zelenskyy and demanding we see this conflict in the same terms that applied to the Cold War when Churchill effectively announced its start, in human years of life. It is a good mental exercise to picture NATO as a 75 year old man. To picture the EU as a 67 year old woman. To picture the UN as an 80 year old of indeterminate gender.

And to picture them all naked too.

And then ask yourself if this is what you want to die for. Or would ask anyone else to die for.

Picture them as very old people who are used to being obeyed. Picture them as loaded down with a lifetime of errors and sins. Picture them making querulous demands and shaking walking canes. Picture them confused by the modern world, angry at the passing of time, embittered by your youth and your vigour, jealous of your years yet to come, perhaps inappropriately and pathetically lusting after your much younger body, or even worse perversely and obscenely eyeing your children.

Imagine, if you will, that Joe Biden is a very good summation of what the EU or the UN or the ‘international rules based order’ would be if they walked around housed in a single body, and led by a single disintegrating wicked mind.

Nations do not become vile and irrelevant and obscene, or weak and pathetic and cruel, by automatic spans of time. They can last for thousands of years, and go through several periods of senescence and Renaissance before their end. The relative youth, the USA, is some 250 years old. The true elders in Western Europe, like England, are a millennia and a half old. Nations can last.

But bureaucracies? Bodies invented on a whim, unsecured by any true and lasting loyalties, untethered from blood and soil, imagined into being by one bureaucrat, and bloated beyond bearing by another? Well those age like a single human being.

There is no bureaucracy that lasts 80 years without becoming either the shadow or the mockery of what it once was. The Soviet Union was such a bureaucracy, rather than a real nation, even though it had Russia at its core. Well, the international rules based order and the transnational bodies dominated by the western ‘Free World’ are also such a bureaucracy. They had the US at their core, feeding from it, at times being directed by it, more often being things that shared the same cancer as the whole stitched together monster stumbled about the globe getting everything wrong, driven by the parasitic worm in the brain called the Intelligence Agencies.

For 80 years the Cancer grew, until the Cancer considered itself the sum of the Man.

That is the bureaucracy in all its bodies established by the settlement of World War II grew and grew and grew, feeding on the nations that founded it. Feeding until it became fat, old, senile and mean.

While the US, firmly wedded under self hating Globalist Americans to keeping the bureaucracy alive and content, has with Trump’s 2nd term acquired a reviving dose of objective reality, the UK and Europe wander ever more complacently towards the Abyss by skipping happily along the yellow brick road of Delusion.

And what Europe and the UK both seem determined on now is to cement their own irrelevance, lock the faulty logic and the self contradictions in, and immolate their aged forms and suffering peoples on the bonfire of their vanity.

Western Europe under Globalist direction has become an obscene harridan, dreaming of Zelensky’s embrace, smearing on makeup in order to pretend to be young and pretty and free of sin, and failing on every level of analysis, except at the task of deceiving themselves. An old stitched together lady suffering from dementia may be pitiable, but is certainly not reasonable. But this is what European powers now seem to realists in both America and Russia.

This is what the great institutions seem to be to those who can see.

This is what the international rules based order looks like to everyone outside it.

Weak, crazy, absurd, lazy, delusional, broken and toothless too.

So many of these ideas and institutions are past their time, so many are clear anachronisms and archaisms. Younger than nations, but older than their true purpose. Living beyond their usefulness, and deep into their days of decline. Flailing around in senile rages, on behalf of dead causes. Invoking old wars and former glories, but having nothing real to back it up with.

A Britain rattling its sabre as if it still had an Empire, with only 50 working tanks and 18,500 troops that are able to fight.

Macron imagining himself as Napoleon, while possessed of all the military might and genius one might find in the pan of an unflushed public toilet.

Whole populations not prepared to fight themselves, for any cause including the defence of their shores or the protection of their daughters, but easily whipped into a frothing frenzy of war hungry virtue signalling whenever the press pleases and the war is abroad.

How could the Russians do anything BUT laugh, and the realistic Americans too.

What should we call this great Curtain, the one that falls in the middle of the Atlantic dividing sane and realistic Americans from absurd and delusional Europeans? It’s neither Iron nor Silk, but spun of the threads of lies, stronger at trapping those who wish to be trapped than any other material, and less than any brushed aside spiderweb to those still aware of reality.

Geopolitical realities shift like tectonic plates. The world realigns. America seeks to divest itself of parasites, domestic and foreign, a giant reviving, shaking its head and restoring true sight. And off the giants back sloughs the rules based order. Across the Bering Strait one giant views another, realising perhaps that they need not fight when little old howling midgets demand it. In that mixed shadow Western Europe lies, and lies, and lies, but both giants know it.

What can Britain or Europe be, if they keep on this path, with our current masters? If they continue as the last people on Earth still following the mainstream media and dancing to the Globalist command? When Americans see clearly, and every other nation outside of our Unfree Free World knows real strength from false pretence, when others on all sides pursue their own sane interests? What can they be in a multipolar future except what their sclerotic bureaucracies train them to be, the masters of decline, the irrelevant custodians of failed utopia, the block of the blockheads.