For three years we have had war in Ukraine, masterminded on the NATO side by senile warmonger-in-chief Joe Biden. This war included bizarre moments, like direct attacks on German energy infrastructure, and also escalatory brinksmanship, as when Biden authorised long-range missile strikes within Russian territory, and the Russians responded with a not-so-subtle threat of nuclear retaliation. Throughout all of this madness, the Europeans slept, sparing hardly a single thought for their defence. Now that Donald Trump hopes to end the war in Ukraine, however, continental political leaders are losing their minds. War: not scary at all. Peace: an existential threat.
The first way our leaders hope to dispel the disturbing spectre of peace is via Ursula von der Leyen’s ‘ReArm Europe’ initiative, which will permit member states to take on billions in debt to fund their rearmament. In this way, the clueless histrionic Brussels juggernaut hopes (in the words of Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk) to “join and win the arms race” with Russia, even if (in the words of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung – h/t the incomparable Roger Köppel) we must “avoid for the moment a confrontation with the new Washington”. Becoming a global superpower with a view towards confronting the hated Americans is all about spending and time, you don’t need strategy or a plan or anything like that.
Those of you wondering whether it might be a better idea to rearm first and then set about alienating our powerful geopolitical partners simply lack the Eurotardian vision. These are such serious people, that in the space of a few days they spun up this remarkable logo for their spending programme…
…which obviously portrays the EU member states smearing yellow warpaint on themselves and in no way evokes the most notorious obscene internet image of all time. Nations just do stuff, but the Eurotards cannot even take a shit without bizarre hamfisted branding campaigns.
As I said, these are deeply serious people, and they also speak very seriously, in declarative sentences that don’t mean anything. In a publicity statement, von der Leyen said that these are “extraordinary times” which are a “watershed moment” for Europe and also a “watershed moment” for Ukraine. Such extraordinary watersheds require “special measures”, such as “peace through strength” and “defence” through “investment”. Top EU diplomat and leading Estonian crazy person Kaja Kallas for her part noted that “we have initiative on the table” and that she’s “looking forward to seeing Europe show unity and resolve”. Perhaps there will also be money in the ReArm Europe programme to outfit Brussels with an arsenal of thesauruses so we do not have to hear the same words all the time.
The European defence-spending orgy was inspired partly by our deeply spooked and unstable soon-to-be Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, whose spirit animal is a pigeon.
Merz spent the entire recent election campaign assuring CDU voters that he would never, ever, under any circumstances at all, in any conceivable universe, agree to lifting the German debt brake. Campaign Merz was the Pigeon of Fiscal Responsibility, and he even had his stalwart opposition to deficit spending in excess of 0.35% of GDP inscribed into his party’s election programme. Merz rhapsodised on the wonders of the debt brake at every opportunity. He said strict deficit spending rules are necessary to “protect the money and tax burdens of the younger generation” and that “we collect one trillion Euros in taxes a year”, and he asked, “shouldn’t we be able to make do with that?”
Merz no longer believes we should be able to make do with that, and the story of his turnabout is so farcical, I can hardly believe it. Last Tuesday, all of the Eurotards managed to terrify themselves that Donald Trump would announce the withdrawal of the United States from NATO in his pending congressional address. I said in my last post that this was not going to happen, but none of our Eurotard ruling class have any good lines of communication to the Trump administration or any understanding of American intentions at all. Thus Merz apparently believed these crazy rumours, and in a fit of panic he decided that Germany should abolish the debt brake after all. Overnight, he announced plans to reform the German Constitution to exempt much defence spending from debt limits entirely, and also to establish a 500 billion-Euro ‘special fund’ for infrastructure spending. (In German politics, ‘special fund’ is a euphemism for ‘great big wad of debt’.)
Altogether, Merz’s proposed spending spree will reach something approaching 20% of German GDP. To piss away all of this money, Merz will need a two-thirds vote of the Parliament, and so he’ll have to force his plan through in the last days of the present Bundestag, as the establishment parties will no longer have the necessary votes when the new Bundestag sits at the end of the month (the AfD and the Left Party will be too powerful then). Democracy!
Obviously it would be a good idea for Germany specifically and Europe in general to begin funding its own defence, but three things dampen my enthusiasm for the present hysteria. First, there is the hysteria part: if Covid has taught us anything, it is that little good can come from these self-reinforcing spirals of childish hyperventilation. The second is the imprudent undertone of isolationist Amerophobia and the total lack of any coherent plan beyond “we must spend a bunch of money immediately”. The third, which proceeds from the second, is the absence of any talk whatsoever about serious institutional reform. Pouring money into our existing defence bureaucracies is not going to yield shiny new powerful armies, it is just going to get us more bureaucrats and a few ridiculous, deeply expensive and impossible-to-maintain pieces of military hardware.
Don’t believe me? Consider what happened under Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel, when our Bundeswehr attempted to procure updated Puma infantry fighting vehicles for German soldiers. In the insane upside-down world of the Federal Republic, not even the military is exempt from our complex workplace health and safety regulations. Thus the new Pumas had to provide such optimal interior climactic conditions “that they could transport heavily pregnant female soldiers during combat missions”. Specifically, the vehicles had to be built such that munitions fumes would not threaten “amniotic fluid damage among female crew”. These and other bizarre requirements drove the cost and complexity of manufacture so high that the notoriously incompetent procurement authority in Koblenz never succeeded in replacing our outmoded 1970s-era Marders, hundreds of which remain in service. Original plans to buy 1,000 Pumas had to be scaled back to a mere 350 – still the number that remains in service today. These overwrought machines are prone to maintenance problems and probably at best half of them are operational. They also rank among the most expensive infantry fighting vehicles in the entire world, costing between €7 and €10 million per vehicle (in 2015 money).
Merz hopes to spend at least 400 billion Euros on expanding the Bundeswehr, and this money will either be poured into disgraceful boondoggles like the Puma, or go straight to the Americans – our newfound geopolitical rivals! – because at least their stuff kind of works. And what is not wasted on unworkable albatross projects will be absorbed by bureaucrats, planners, consultants and other official layabouts. The wide-ranging, fundamental reforms have to come first, but all the present German and European leadership can imagine doing is spending money. I fear that we will not emerge from the present panic stronger or more secure; we will just end up poorer, more geopolitically isolated and vastly more bureaucratised than we already are.
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War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.
Gaslit on covyd, gaslit on climayte, gaslit on Ukrayne.
The heirs to the First Amendment are calling it out.
Perhaps the lure of increased spending on re-arming is just a national version of retail therapy? Which will almost certainly result in unopened boxes of junk in the back room plus a lot of bills.
I can absolutely vouch first-hand for the ineptitude of military procurement. It’s absolutely unbelievable on the whole.
It’s entirely, treasonously deliberate.
Liberal politicians in Europe want to spend billions of tax payers money on a threat that does not exist.
Putin has said time and time again that Russia has no designs on any European country.
The Ukraine civil war after the US/EU violent coup of 2014 against the democratically elected government deteriorated to the extent that ethnic Russians in the east faced a potential ethnocide.
Russia showed remarkable restraint by taking 8 years to intervene.
Russia wants normal relations with the rest of the world.
Liberal politicians, particularly in Europe, are inflaming the situation.
“You might think he was fighting with Sweden, seizing their lands,” Mr Putin said, referring to the Northern Wars which Peter launched at the turn of the 18th Century as he forged a new Russian Empire.
“But he seized nothing; he reclaimed it!” he said, arguing that Slavs had lived in the area for centuries.
“It seems it has fallen to us, too, to reclaim and strengthen,”
Indeed. Ukraine has never existed. The name is slang for borderlands – the Russian borderland. Russians built the Uketopia displacing the Musulman Turks along the Black Sea and spreading civilisation within the east, south and centre of the Uketopia.
Ukeland is a fiction. Like Belgium.
“Putin’s statements (which he has reiterated on various occasions) are wrong on two counts: For one, the claim that present-day eastern or southern Ukraine should have been considered part of “the historical South of Russia” or “primordially Russian territories” in the 1920s seems preposterous, since there had been no substantial Russian presence in these territories at any time prior to the 19th century. Secondly, Putin’s assertion that Ukraine’s south-eastern borders were established “with no consideration for the ethnic make-up of the population” is equally false.
The first Soviet census in 1926, a few years after the eastern borders of the UkrSSR had been finalised, showed that in all territories of eastern Ukraine, including those that are now contested, ethnic Ukrainians still far outnumbered ethnic Russians.
What ultimately changed this in the 1930s was the demographic devastation wrought by Stalin’s agricultural genocide, the ‘Holodomor’
‘By redrawing borders and rewriting history the Kremlin is unlikely to have done itself a favour. Through its intervention in Ukraine it has galvanised most Ukrainians in their aversion to Russia and has thereby done a great deal to demarcate the perceived differences between Ukrainians and Russians more clearly than ever before.’
‘Following the final Partitions of Poland in the 1790s, the Russian Empire absorbed the remainder of modern-day Ukraine (apart from its extreme west, which was annexed by Austria).
The territories of Ukraine remained a part of the Russian state for the next 120 years.
Russia’s imperial authorities systematically persecuted expressions of Ukrainian culture and made continuous attempts to suppress the Ukrainian language. In spite of this, a distinct Ukrainian national consciousness emerged and consolidated in the course of the 19th century, particularly among the elites and intelligentsia, who made various efforts to further cultivate the Ukrainian language.
When the Russian Empire collapsed in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1917, the Ukrainians declared a state of their own.
After several years of warfare and quasi-independence, however, Ukraine was once again partitioned between the nascent Soviet Union and newly independent Poland.
From the early 1930s onwards, nationalist sentiments were rigorously suppressed in the Soviet parts of Ukraine, but they remained latent and gained further traction through the traumatic experience of the ‘Holodomor’, a disastrous famine brought about by Joseph Stalin’s agricultural policies in 1932-33 that killed between three and five million Ukrainians.
Armed revolts against Soviet rule were staged during and after World War II and were centred on the western regions of Ukraine that had been annexed from Poland in 1939-40.
It was only with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 that Ukraine gained lasting independent statehood of its own – but Ukrainian de facto political entities struggling for their autonomy or independence had existed long before that.’
Russian rulers routinely claim that all Slavs are really Russians and should thus be rightfully ruled by Russia despite modern Russia is a distant descendent of the Grand Duchy of Moscow and a lot of other slavic states used to exist west of it.
Indeed so.
And, as so many have pointed out elsewhere, Putin’s Russia is hell bent on a program of demographic imperialist colonialism.
Putin sees no limits to that colonial empire and considers that, without such an empire, Russia’s demographic decline is such that it will disappear as a nation.
Which is not to say that he intends to drive to Dunkirk. But he very much will attempt the same subversive techniques he used in Eastern Ukraine within the rest of the territories of the old USSR.
His intention is to return Russia to the borders of the USSR and to dominate, determine the domestic and foreign policies of continental Europe.
And many Eastern European states have joined NATO precisely because they see such a threat to their survival as independent states with stark clarity.
That Poland and Finland possess two of the strongest European armies is an indication of how seriously they take that eventuality.
Utter and complete drivel! Repeating the utter and complete drivel pouring out of the mouths of the European masters, our wonderful politicians. As the article states, Merz promised one thing, was voted into office and then does a complete turnabout: the typical European leader. Just like Zelensky, who was voted into office because he promised peace. So much for democracy!
And Palestine.
You mean Israel? Never existed before 1948.
No, I mean Palestine. Doesn’t exist.
I suspect that for the woke marxo-fascist ruling elite war is actually quite expedient.
They got a taste of extraordinary power during the Covid crisis and they rather liked it.
Then Covid fizzled out and it would be oh-so-nice to have some emergency situation to replace it. Then they could impose all sorts of restrictions on the population, create a sense of danger, censor opposing voices, create a sense of unity through the notion of an enemy.
Every totalitarian state is heavily militarized. As we move closer to a that sooner or later this will happen again.
A great picture of modern society. We have increasingly put our lives in the hands of an ever more powerful but ever more clueless establishment.
Hate to sound like a broken record but there is no possibility of reforming any of it. The only way out is to cut off the money, which is ultimately where all the power comes from.
Quick! Spend 2% of GDP!
On what?
Who cares? As long as we meet the required spend.
Send Freidrich Merz, Angela Kasner Merkel and Ursula Von Der Lyin’ to the Ukrainian front, after receiving 2 weeks military training like the Russian/Ukrainian conscripts receive.
Angela Kasner Merkel can show the other two how to shoot a gun, because she has military experience from her days as a Communist Youth Stasi member in Communist East Germany.
Don’t forget Ursula’s already gained valuable experience when she was responsible for the German army. Soldiers had to be issued with broomsticks due to the lack of guns.
Ursula is the German equivalent of Rachel from Accounts.
Oh, thanks for that interesting historical snippet— I just looked it up to find out more. I hadn’t realised that The Wannabe Empress of Europe had been Germany’s Defence Minister!
Your last sentence is brilliant— a quote to remember! 🙂
Von der Layen was sent to her token post as chef of the EC precisely because she had proven to be a f***ing disaster as member of the German government who was actually responsible for something. The broomstick story sounds wrong or at least, I’ve never heard of that. Some real ones were:
Very interesting details! And even the broomsticks story is actually true, as I’ve just discovered:
Ursula von der Leyen’s army so under-equipped it used broomsticks instead of guns | World | News | Express.co.uk
“Bundeswehr troops tried to hide their lack of arms by replacing heavy machine guns with broomsticks during a NATO exercise.
After painting the wooden sticks black, the German soldiers attached them to the top of armoured vehicles, according to a confidential army report which was leaked to German broadcaster ARD.”
And here’s another article from The Spectator:
Ursula von der Leyen has always left a trail of disaster | The Spectator
The example of the Puma indicates that the system of diversity is at odds with producing the unity required in warfare. Of course a heavily pregnant female is certain to want to go into battle. Stop the war/manoeuvres, a baby is on the way.
Debt has consequences. The USA spent more last year servicing its debt than on the military.
Importing billions of euros in Russian energy, in the advent of a war the continent would only be able to fight when the wind was blowing. As for the UK, the country is too sick with over 2 million people on long term sickness disability benefit to be trained for war.
The EU was designed so that member states could not fight a war of industrial production and manpower between themselves; the sort of war being fought in Ukraine. Von der Leyen’s ‘best’ idea is the steel porcupine for Ukraine; putting the EU permanently into a militarised relationship with Russia. The concerning part is what will these Eurocrats do if Ukraine collapses militarily? Panic?
Well. Britain has about twice as many admirals as functioning warships. Perhaps we could send some of these useless, overpaid, over-pensioned penpushers to defend Ukraine’s borders as they certainly do nothing to defend the UK’s borders against the Third-World invasion. https://dailysceptic.org/2025/02/20/what-do-britains-admirals-do-all-day/
Taking proper responsibility for your own defence sounds like a good idea, but I am far from convinced we need to spend more than we are already.
I would feel more enthusiastic about it probably if we hadn’t surrendered our country to legal and illegal immigrants and to woke socialism.
I wonder if this hysterical European initiative isn’t actually a good thing. Lots of money will be spent and I still believe that if you hit people hard enough in the pocket you will eventually discover that they don’t really want forever wars if they have to pay for them, and they are happy to burn the planet to a cinder if it’s a choice between that and the lights going off. Perhaps today’s glorious sunshine has made me optimistic 🙂
Forever war is a method of keeping the population occupied and distracted the propagandists who’ve recently started to use it lifted from Orwell’s 1984. But the Ukraine affair – much as the Russians are apparently annoyed by their inability to break out of pretty static trench fighting – started in 2014 and didn’t become really hot until 2022. This was/ is the first military conflict in Europe (excluding Russia) since the Yugoslavian wars of the 1990s.
Indeed. The US has been the specialist in this area but various European countries have been more or less enthusiastic supporters, especially the UK.
What I meant to say is that the people who fairly recently started to use the term for their propaganda despite it doesn’t make any sense probably/ possibly just copied the idea from 1984. There wouldn’t be a war in Ukraine hadn’t the Russians attacked it in 2022. Putin is still stuck with a war he apparently cannot win. And hence, success must come to him by other means. Principally, by making his opponents incapable of further resistance by ‘diplomatic’ efforts targetted at their supporters.
If unilateral disarmament is so great, why aren’t the Russians doing it?
As German with a bit of knowledge about recent German history beyond what TPTB want to be taught to schoolchildren, I’m deeply suspicious about something like this. Since 1949, Pacifism is – in addition to antifascism – the semi-official German state religion¹ and it was also a strong current during the Weimar republic — among more-or-less openly communist intellectuals and people to whom the ideal Germany would be a (deindustrialized) green meadow of docily grazing sheep strongly attached to France, the state which had just conquered Germany, albeit not really by military means. And that’s certainly very convenient for the victors as they won’t have to exert themselves again for as long as this mood prevails among the subjugated.
The spending aka money laundering is the easy bit. Think of a number…
I would feel more enthusiastic about it probably if we hadn’t surrendered our country to legal and illegal immigrants and to woke socialism.
Snap.
This reads exactly like the absolutely typical layman’s rant about “anything military.” I remember reading something very similar about the RN Type 45 destroyers in the Eye a while back. The central complaint was that all core systems originated in the USA and thus, couldn’t be effectively serviced by UK personnel — but at least, their stuff works. Or at least, Eugyppius is even less informed about it but assumes that – since it’s American!!1 – it must certainly be very much superior! Not unheard for thoroughly Americanized Germans.
It is just to keep the gravy train going on for a bit longer. They are like addicts who forego any sense of perspective when they are in the depths of a binge. This isn’t going to happen it is practically impossible for it to happen. More of a confidence trick than a delusion but it can’t even work as a confidence trick anymore. They are going down big time and they won’t be given the luxury of cold turkey.
Just get the hell out of Europe if you have the chance, Even if it some old bag relative in Australia just ingratiate yourself, get the hell out and worry about the niceties afterwards.
If it’s any consolation Eugypius, Two-Tier and the morons in the MoD will do exactly the same here.
I wonder how many of our 72,000 Army have decided to quit now, rather than hang around to be sent off to Ukraine on Two-Tier’s delusional suicide mission …. and then face the prospect of decades of Human Rights Lawyers pursuing them via the Courts?
I fear that we will not emerge from the present panic stronger or more secure; we will just end up poorer, more geopolitically isolated and vastly more bureaucratised than we already are.
I suspect that you are correct! What a colossal waste of money and effort.