Europeans are starting to ask, with intense angst, why Europe, mainly Western Europe must perish for the Ukraine. Few want the Ukraine to be swallowed whole by Russia, but there have been numerous proposals for peace, giving Putin an honourable exist, while still allowing the Ukraine to exist. For example, the Ukraine not joining NATO would be a major concession to de-escalate conflict, as Musk said, and was howled down for it. But, there is no compromise from Zelensky, and the assumption is that Putin is merely attempting to regain the territories of the former USSR. It is possible, but if wrong, should the world test this by allowing the US neo-cons to slide into World War III? I am amazed that even freedom movement types are not feeling concerned about the implications that this conflict is likely to bring. Do they think radioactivity is a new type of health food?
“Having European-born parents who never really came to terms with America, I grew up listening to paeans about the wonders of Europe. It wasn’t just the culture and natural beauty they praised; it was also Europe’s cradle-to-grave “soft” socialism. “Why can’t America do that?” they wondered, failing to realize that America and Americans were doing that…for Europe. Because America heavily subsidized Europe's defense costs, Europe had money to spare for cradle-to-grave care.
Now, though, with the Cold War long over and American money finally drying up, Europe is running on fumes—and those fumes just got strangled when European leadership’s support for Ukraine meant that Putin cut off Europe’s natural gas. With that, formerly complacent Europeans, facing a cold, dark, and hungry winter, have had enough and they are taking to the streets.
Not The Bee noticed the American and European media’s lack of enthusiasm for covering events in Europe. That malaise no doubt stems from the fact that these events challenge the narrative of happy Europeans supporting the wars against Putin and CO2, even as they slowly freeze and starve to death in their dark apartments over the coming winter. To offset the lackluster coverage, Not The Bee assembled a sizable collection of tweets showing massive protests in Europe’s major cities. I have included just some of them below but encourage you to see the entire collection at the link.
Ever since World War II ended, Europeans have been governed by the tyrannical monarchy known as “socialism,” an institution that, in place of monarchs and aristocrats, has politicos and bureaucrats exercising complete control over the people. For at least 40 years now, thanks in large part to the EU’s monopolistic, bureaucratic power, voting in Europe has been about as meaningful as voting in North Korea—no matter the individual candidate, you’re always voting for the same party hack. However, as noted, American money, along with the elites’ commitment to using a carefully controlled marketplace ideology as the opiate of the people, the system worked for decades.
Now, though, the European elites’ commitment to the climate control agenda has seen it abandon a marketplace ideology that required fossil fuels and, instead, go all in for a return to pre-modern environmental purity. Were the elites smarter, they’d realize that pre-modern purity meant lives of unending labor that was offset through…wait for it…using slaves to offset the labor of a nation’s own, natural-born citizens.
The ordinary Europeans, who are now getting their first experience with the return to a non-Biblical Eden that the World Economic Forum crowd envisions, have suddenly realized how this is going to end for them and they’re not happy. The question now is whether their unhappiness will lead to the collapse of the post-WWII and post-Cold War status quo in Europe—and, if that happens, the really big question is what that means for Americans stuck with a president who wants to govern as a European.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-threat-of-civil-war-in-europe/
“While 2022 has already seen its fair share of horror in the ongoing Russo-Ukraine War, this winter might see the further rise of a new specter: civil war. German social researcher Piotr Kocyba expects a new, violent wave of protests as the continent turns colder. Kocyba, who works at the Chemnitz University of Technology and is a member of the board of the Berlin Institute for Protest and Movement Research, claims that right-wing extremists are already heating up the mood, but the left also wants to call citizens to street demonstrations. "If the crisis lasts longer, it cannot be ruled out that terrorist groups will form, as was the case during the anti-refugee protests," the researcher explained to German media.
Kocyba is not alone. "Europe's wealthiest nations face rising risks of civil unrest over the winter, including street protests and demonstrations, due to high energy prices and mounting costs of living, according to a risk consultancy firm," writes Reuters. And according to Verisk Maplecroft's principal analyst Torbjorn Soltvedt: "Over the winter, it wouldn't come as a surprise if some of the developed nations in Europe start to see more serious forms of civil unrest.” This was before Reuters reported that Europe might have to brace for mobile phone outages, as currently there are not enough back-up systems in many European countries to handle widespread power cuts.
The authorities are not optimistic either. Stephan Kramer, president of the domestic intelligence office for the state of Thuringia, told German broadcaster ZDF that he expects “legitimate protests will be infiltrated by extremists…and that it is likely that some will turn violent.” They will likely be worse than what has already been seen. “What we have experienced so far in the Covid pandemic in terms of partly violent confrontations on social networks, but also in the streets and squares, was probably more like a children’s birthday party in comparison,” Kramer said.
John Laughland, a visiting fellow at Hungary's Mathias Corvinus Collegium, while skeptical of the "power of the street," anticipates that "we are going into uncharted territory. If there are power cuts, if people are cold, if there are breakdowns in food supplies, if the mobile telephone networks break down...because they have batteries and if there are power cuts for too long, they might not work,” the results will be “unpredictable.”
These warnings might come as a surprise for those not paying attention to the social disintegration of Western Europe in the past decade. But Europe has seen a series of escalating social crises in the past ten years, from major cost-of-living increases, to mass immigration, to the pandemic lockdowns. A winter without energy might prove to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Back in 2018, the Yellow Vest movement in France brought 300,000 people to the streets in more than a thousand protests against the rise of the price of diesel fuel, which had risen to an average of €1.51 per liter (today the price stands at €1.65 per liter). They lit fires, tore down street signs, erected barricades, pulled up paving stones and hurled them at police while shouting slogans against liberal President Emmanuel Macron. The Yellow Vest protestors were middle-aged white Europeans from working class neighborhoods. Is France ready for the revolt of immigrant Muslim youth from the ghettos when the heaters go cold and the phone batteries die?”