Epistle to the Europeans #1: What the hell is wrong with us?

[Cain]

Epistle to the Europeans

What the hell is wrong with you?  What the hell is wrong with us, I should say, for even if I have disowned my country for their treasonous behaviour I cannot so easily write off the continent for which I have a lot of love.  Where did it all go wrong?

We have discord bred in our bones.  Even by the general standards of humanity, we have to consider that, historically speaking, we have been the most faithful of Eris (if we knew it or not), either directly or through the influence of our ideas.  Other nations can boast and recall their civil wars ,Äì for one thousand five hundred years we had our own, only uniting in the most dire of circumstances and dividing again as soon as it had passed.  Often proving, in the process, the historical maxim that great wars to save a people are often followed by ones that nearly destroy them (usually in the next week in our case).  We can even see the legacy of this today, where in parts of the continent you can cross several borders on foot in a day.

We not only knew Discord like an old relative, we positively embraced it and set the standards for the rest of the world.  Africa?  Yup, we caused that, all of it.  We set the state boundaries after all, ensuring at least another two centuries of tribal based strife before the borders are re-asserted along more ethnic lines.  Indochina?  The French colonized all of it, bringing in the possibly most nationalistic and anti-imperialistic people of the world into their little empire.  Hell, countries as large as Poland have ceased to exist for hundred of years, only to pop back into being like nothing ever happened!  The state boundaries changed weekly and if you lived in a border town you could never move in your life and have citizenship in several different nations.  We even produced the English aristocracy, men who held you had to be icily polite to an enemy but could snub your friends any time you felt like it and would fight in the desert or the rainforest or mountains in bright red and white costumes because do otherwise would be ,Äúunsporting,Äù.

Where did it all go wrong?

Partly Hitler of course.  If, according to Nietzsche, Napoleon's saving grace was that he made nationalism possible, then Hitler's was that he made war nearly impossible.  But that Aneristic bastard of the highest order destroyed the fun for the rest of us.  After he finally bought it, his would be assassins and their covert friends in the governments of Europe and America set up the institutions that would eventually bring about the EU, that bastard child of Kant's dreams in Perpetual Peace and the end of Eristic fun.  Whats the problem with that? I hear you ask.  Everything.  Since then its been tired looking hippies, two week package holidays to the Costa del Sol and David Hasselhoff records.  We emphasized order over the creativity which had put us ahead of the world.  Machiavelli's Prince could not have existed if it were not for men like Cesare Borgia, if his native Florence had not revolted and he had been removed from his office by the revolutionary government.  Hugo Grotius could not have made the basis for international law possible unless he had witnessed the horror of the Thirty Years War.  Par?® could not have hoped to figure out his medical advances without the dire need for them of the battlefields of the French military.  And so on.

Now we have to all pretend to like each other, even when we know the French would love nothing more than to parachute the Foreign Legion over England because of the Olympic Games bid and London would love to reciprocate.  Even by making Cyprus and Turkey get along.  Are we going to suck the fun out of everything by trying to ignore and remove our own little irrational hatreds of each other?  What the hell is wrong with us?

Even the Cold War was somewhat better.  If things got boring we could always look to the massing tank forces preparing to flood through the Fulda Gap and take Bonn by force.  Berlin was a bloody war zone where spies died in their droves and in Amsterdam the bodies of retired diamond dealers, drug runners and pimps working in the Great Game could be seen floating down river.  Even when the Soviet tanks backed off to rescue or kill Yeltsin, we had the entertaining side show of Yugoslavia.  Now we want to let Serbia of all places join our little European ,ÄúPeace and Flowers and No Haters,Äù Union.

Worse than that, we now kowtow to the Americans at every other chance we get, except the French who, admirably, have to be themselves.  And not just over wars and their not so secret gulag system hidden in Romania.  We import their culture and their way of thinking and not even the good parts of that.  For the Brits among you, remember what Channel 4 was like before the advent of reality TV?  Yeah, exactly.  Take away the castles and give everyone English lessons and you could travel from Seattle to London to Warsaw and, apart from France, barely notice the difference.  We gave them the Enlightenment and the best we had to offer (Benjamin Franklin, for example) and in return we got American Gladiators and McDonalds.  And we agreed to it!  Something went horribly wrong, somewhere...

Are we Europeans?  Then we better start bloody well acting like them!  I know we gave up on all that business, but without our anarchy to keep everyone on their toes, it will all go to hell (even the Americans think they can run the world, we've been out of the game so long.  I mean, the Chinese could probably do better, at least they wouldn't expect everyone to like them for it).  Are we the products of 1000 years of the most lethal lab Eris could devise or are we a bunch of whimpering peaceniks, afraid of our own shadows?  And will we remember before its too late to change anything?

[LMNO]

Wow.






Just, wow.








Cain is the smarty at the party.


I feel kind of dirty agreeing that all the bloody wars of history were a good thing, but there you go.

[AFK]

I'll take it a step further.  I think the Cold War was a good thing.  And I mean that as far as their being another Superpower to keep the U.S. in check.  We probably wouldn't be in Iraq right now if it were still on.

[Cain]

Not for the ones who died, certainly. I dont think Europe would have been half as good as it was if there hadn't been, though.  Also, its illustrative that we were much much more disorderly and creative than people currently give us credit for.

[AFK]

Not for the ones who died, certainly.

certainly not.  The innocents who succumb to the travaills of war definitely get the raw end of the deal.  Especially the ones who are just trying to do the simplest thing like go to the market to buy some bread and fruit.  I still have this image seared into my brain from the war in Bosnia I came across when I was doing some research on it.  It was a woman and his son who were going to the market in Sarajevo and the son was shot dead, lying on the pavement in a pool of his blood.  It's images like this that just make me shake my head when I'm in a store and someone is complaining because they didn't get their 20 cent discount on the applesauce they just bought.  Stupid American gits!

[Cain]

Well, my original point is that Europe is dull and it doesn't need to be.  We could be doing all sorts of things, we all hate each others guts and we all are the process of an extremly chaotic social, political and economic series of events going back hundreds of years.  Yet we're currently locked into a mode of thought where we all have to be friends with each other and the rest of the world.  I think its about time people remember how Europe was by bringing that attitude into the present.  Time to start stepping on some toes, winding some people up, giving two fingers to the world powers, be they Russia, China or America.  France and even the last Italian PM, a far right American aper if there ever was one, understood this.

[AFK]

agreed.  The world stage certainly needs to have some re-energizing.  The current production has gotten very old indeed.

[devilinme]

I like the idea I'm getting from this a lot: the EU should consolidate further for the sole reason of pissing off all the bigger nations now that we've done such a sterling job of buggering up all the little ones. Gives a whole new meaning to patriotism too.

dim, feeling dirty but looking forward to more wars.

[Baron Von Stevenstein]

cant read all of this now, leaving for maine, will read when i get back.
from what i read so far, this kicks ass.

mittens

[AFK]

Coming to my neck of the woods eh?  What part of Maine you heading to?

[East Coast Hustle]

cant read all of this now, leaving for maine, will read when i get back.
from what i read so far, this kicks ass.

mittens

watch out for the Wendigo.

they moved in in force after I drove out their natural enemies, the Chupacabra.

ECH,
suggests you stop by for a pizza if you're headed this far up the coast

[East Coast Hustle]

oh, and sorry about the brief threadjack there, Cain.

that was a hell of a piece of writing. makes me wanna go pillage the town across the h arbor, and I'm not even a Euro.

[LMNO]

Today's forecast:



Expect a hail of flaming napalm golfballs to hit the city in force just after a certain pizza parlor closes...

[Michal]

Napalm...

::smiles::

Fun.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I'll take it a step further.  I think the Cold War was a good thing.  And I mean that as far as their being another Superpower to keep the U.S. in check.  We probably wouldn't be in Iraq right now if it were still on.

That's a buncha shit, just saying.

Without the cold war, most Americans would have taken decades longer to get into sheep mode, and Europe wouldn't be so used to following America's lead.