Friday, April 20, 2012

history lesson

Lileks nails it:
the Eurozone troubles have been fascinating to watch. The entire idea seemed like madness to me. Yoking disparate cultures together into a manufactured political union seemed unwise... A new generation may grow up thinking “I am a European!” but it’s a cotton-candy construct that dissolves upon contact with the hot water of current events...

Culture divides; history shapes; language binds. This doesn’t mean it has to result in conflict or adversarial stances, but they’re givens in human nature, and the most workable system is the one that recognizes them and accommodates them, not the one that pretends they are tissue-thin wisps of an old order that can be swept away with a shiny new broom...

It’ll probably end poorly...

Everything about the EU has always seemed like play-acting - functionaries and mandarins pretending to rule over a thing that does not exist, yet given the power to tax and regulate the people who live in their imaginary land...
read the rest, see also Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, USSR, and most any empire.

1 comment:

Col. B. Bunny said...

Europeans learned nothing from the 20th century.The Gestapo were ground under in the last century but the AntiFa scum are tolerated by the present German government.

Europeans are indifferent to the authoritarianism of the E.U., which long ago escaped any control by the European electorate. That electorate wanted redistribution but they unleashed a monster.

Charles Hugh Smith writes today about how the collateral for modern Western debt is ephemeral but those interest payments are very, very real. Ye slow-motion train wreck.