Europe Rearms. Or Tries To. Sort Of?

Trying to follow a news story from day to day you are apt to find the news media--especially the mainstream news media--deluging them with little bits, typically presented without connections or context, all as what passes for help in making sense of them is the platforming of some Establishment functionary not looking to help you think things through for yourself, but rather eager to tell you what to think, which, because they are an Establishment functionary, is likely to be what they want you to think, irregardless of its relationship to reality (with which Establishment functionaries tend not to be on speaking terms, even though they often know enough to realize that it's not what they are saying). You can only make sense of things when you step back from the onslaught of pseudo-information and put the bits together for yourself--or let someone unlikely ever to get much of a mainstream platform talk you through it properly (as many genuine experts of the kind you won't ever see on the panel shows are perfectly happy to do).

So it has gone with the deluge of news about Europe's rearmament, yet another "news story" that is all sound and fury--and exactly the kind of tale that such sound and fury tends to signify. The leaders of European governments, and European Union institutions, make grand pronouncements, and throw around colossal numbers--hundreds of billions, maybe trillions, of euros, as if they are engaged in a bidding war with monopoly money. Yet, at least to go by what we see in public, the talk is completely unconnected with any specific plans or goals--what these vast sums of money are supposed to actually buy, what Europe's forces will look like after the money has been spent not spelled out. Indeed, they don't even seem to know that such targets might have any use here. And all that is to the extent that one can speak of "Europe's" forces at all. After all, serious talk of the integration and synchronization of European defense forces at the level of their militaries, or even talk of collaboration in the production of the weapons they need (or even what weapons they might be), has been pretty much nonexistent--in spite of how little military power the European governments dispose of individually, how we have seen even immense sums of money soaked up in accomplishing very little (remember Sergeant Olaf "I see nothing!" Scholz's hundred billion euro one-off of a few years ago?), and the hard reality that the rather fragmented and withered defense-industrial bases of the continent's various powers ("We can get you ten tanks by next year! Well, not new tanks, just refurbished tanks. Maybe. Do they actually have to be third-generation?" they say as tanks are getting smashed up by the thousands) can deliver that much less "going their way" rather than being made to pull together. Meanwhile said officials are proving rather artlessly dodgy on the matter of where they expect to get the added personnel for their bigger, more powerful, militaries. (Whatever you do, don't say conscription!)

Instead of such specifics what we get is the kind of grandstanding that makes politics "Showbusiness for Ugly People"--the performers in which Showbusiness never fail to remind the onlooker that in their low-rent corner of the show business world the most coveted role of all is that of war leader, the British leader wanting to be Churchill, the Frenchman wanting to be De Gaulle, the German and Italian wanting to be . . . well, better I leave that to your imaginations. Still, this rather shabby and vulgar display is not without its more practical political purposes. After all, posing as war leaders gives them an excuse to call for "unity," which is a professional politician's way of telling the people at the bottom to stop thinking of the problems of everyday life, and how their elected politicians broke their promises to them, and the way their society's elite are leading them all off a cliff, and instead do as the folks in the commercials in the Starship Troopers movies do when looking at the camera and saying "I'm doing my part!" in that way addicts to Greatest Generation piffle about World War Two just can't get enough of--the more in as the supposed necessity of hundreds of billions more for defense is a long-favorite excuse to take hundreds of billions from everything else, which is after all what they were intent on doing anyway. (Orwell readers, remind me--whether the war is with Eurasia or Eastasia, just who was the "real" enemy again?)

All the same, unserious as they are, and domestically-oriented as their agendas may be ("Those who have little shall have less") one should not trivialize the consequences of the talk for an international scene ever more conflict-ridden, ever more tension-filled, ever more dangerous as what a short time earlier seemed virtually unthinkable (like a major land war raging year after year on the European continent) becomes another hard fact of life over and over and over again. And disgraceful as the international media has been in its coverage of the talk over the money, it has been even more so in its failing to drive home the dangers of that still more serious situation they have so little tried to explain to Europe's publics, very few members of whom are eager to cosplay as Johnny Rico with killer drones flying about under the "leadership" of Sir "Free Gear Keir" Starmer, Monsieur "President of the Rich" Macron, or Herr "Manager der Reichen" Merz, let alone experience the potentially much worse that may lie ahead in an age in which elites absolutely refuse to remember that there is such a thing in the world as nuclear weaponry, and how seriously we have to take the fact of its existence.