the case for arming europe

outside the catbox: a thought experiment

in the fine tradition of “cats out on limbs” and “outside the catbox” thought experiments, let’s take a foray into US foreign policy and really see if we can explore some brand new perspectives. after all, it’s just a thought experiment. probably…

a society stands on the brink of internal collapse, beset by invaders it is in no way armed to fight. its government is hopelessly corrupt, venal, kleptocratic, and arrays itself against the interests of the people in service of the oligarchic interests of self-styled “elites.” violence rises, totalitarian rule impends (or already pertains), and the people are ill equipped to resist the main force of power to which no truth may be spoken, much less lived.

a once free people teeter on the brink of conquest by dictators.

if you watch too much CNN, one might suppose i speak of ukraine or russia or myanmar or some other such situation, but i don’t.

i speak of europe.

of the west.

of the UK, germany, and france, of romania and ireland. it’s getting very, very ugly over there and maybe it’s time we stopped worrying about sending guns to the war dwarf to prop up the rotten european elites through forever-war in the increasingly unfunny dark comedy club of ukraine and started getting into the game to protect our traditional allies, the actual european people.

perhaps it’s not the EU militaries suddenly discussing buying guns and tanks again that need re-arming.

perhaps it’s the european citizenry itself, our friends, the rest of the west. those who were disarmed and who stand in peril because of it.

at first pass, this likely sounds like a crazy idea.

bear with with me. it is perhaps not as crazy as you think.

civilization is a set of solutions to which the problems have been forgotten.

this is always so.

this is, quite literally, the point of civilization: you find ways to cooperate and solve problems, to live together and to find human flourishing, to escape from misery and want and danger. the whole point of a good civilization is to make problems go away, to remove them from our lives.

the problem is that once you alleviate such things, people forget that they were things.

plenty seems the norm not the exception, safety get taken for granted, liberty simply appears the base state of man. none of these things are true. each is secured by civilizational practice that becomes so ingrained, so rote, that people forget what it’s for. then, against chesteronian admonition, the people of plenty and prosperity and liberty start tearing down fences whose purpose they did not understand (or perhaps even realize were fences) and thereby do civilizations decline “by forgetting the obvious things.”

this drives the cycle of rise and fall

well, here’s an obvious thing:

and here’s another:

it's difficult not to get the sense that many of the self-styled "elites" in europe are watching the rapid rejection and disassembly of the american aristocracy and are starting to take truly draconian measures to prevent the peasants from emulating it and rising against them over on the other side of the atlantic.

non-crime hate speech arrests are a chilling form of societal suppression that seems to be spreading to country after country.

german rapists go free and people who complain about it go to jail. UK parents are frogmarched for criticizing schools on whatsapp.

this is a venal ruling class passing the point of trying to manufacture consent and beginning to compel it by blatant, obvious, even ostentatiously excessive force.

you don’t send 6 cops to drag people away over a whatsapp comment unless you are trying to make a statement.

elections have been canceled because "we don't like the results." popular political parties are proscribed or blocked from power. based on some leaked papers, the ruling clan in germany (who just blocked the afd from power) now wants to “ban lies” to “save democracy.”

of course they do.

those who can convince free people to give consent through the power of their ideas pose grave risk to those who are resorting to compelling compliance to their imposed ideologies.

the only way to retain rule is to stamp the speech of others out and thereby become the only one speaking.

“national socialist workers party establishes ministry of truth to prevent the spread of lies about the national socialist worker’s party”

if only there were some historical precedent we could use to inform our views on how such ideas wind up working in practice. oh, wait…

meanwhile, the simmering discontent of a continent that no longer grows or develops economically and is moving backwards on energy, health, technology, and culture is finding expression as populism and "the nobles" are declaring it outlaw and getting ready to ride warhorses over the commoners who fail to disperse.

and so i come back to this:

to hell with arming the ukraine, if america really wants to get into the good fight, we should be re-arming the people of europe.

they're the ones in danger.

the traditional allies of america have never been the european nobility nor its ruling classes. they’re the ones we fought and this latest class of “we can’t be fascists because we’re left wingers and greens!” are no exception.

the last fascist movement in europe also came from the left and the greens, led by vegetarian eco-artists. claims it was right wing are as self-serving as they are historically inaccurate. it’s the same damn class, in many cases the same damn families, pushing the same damn policy of “technocratic rule by your betters” but inverted into globalism instead of nationalism to try to flood the box with imported mercenaries and workers to mask the incipient demographic and economic failures of their regime and the promised but increasingly unaffordable welfare state swaddling with which they have held their populaces in thrall.

it starts to look an awful lot like war.

aristocracies love war. it’s sport to them. they don’t die, you do and traditionally, it’s a wonderful way to round up all the discontented males of a certain age and send them off to be the meat that meets bullets and thereby remove them from contention for your power. war is also the excuse to do the inexcusable, to abrogate rights amidst the jingo call to battle. but of late, the state seeks not to war against external enemies but against its own people.

the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the wars on racism and sexism and phobia, the war against disease, the newfound and intensely inverted “war on hatred” and “war on hate speech,” it’s really all of a piece: a way to suspend morality and rights and pretext for the ruling cadres to come for you if you buck.

identify, other, isolate, and attack.

make extreme object lessons of minor “offenses” to intimidate the rest. let “fear of the thought police” cow a society into policing itself.

the as ever apposite rothbard encapsulates this perfectly.

because here’s another obvious thing it would seem that far too many have forgotten:

then ask yourself: what is the state defending?

because, increasingly, it looks like it’s defending the conquest of its own people and the destruction of their way of life.

now the fear is, of course, that the weak people who are bringing on these hard times are not worth arming and wouldn’t know what to do even if you did. they have laid down and done nothing, consented to be ruled by aristocracy and invader alike, suppressed and disenfranchised by the total state that they themselves pay for. the tax plantation serfs generate the revenue that’s used to subsidize the rapidly growing families of the agents of cultural disruption.

of many, i’m sure this is so.

this is the core vulnerability of the high trust society: it has very little internal immune system, it cannot fight off invaders once they are inside the walls and so long as the aristocracy keeps inviting them in, it’s just going to keep getting worse especially as the radically different birthrates add an exponential to the mathematics of “democracy.” the elite would rather rule over low trust dysfunction than be supplanted by high trust classical liberals. this path is not an accident.

and once set in motion, it gets very aggressive, very fast. these immigrants are not from high trust societies. they do not believe in golden rules. they think it’s hilariously stupid and an excuse to run a smash and grab on dimwit foreigners and take their stuff. this is not “people from the third world coming to join a society and partake of its ethos” it’s “the actual third world bringing the third world to the first world” and in the third world, government is not for protecting people, government is the biggest gang in town, the one who gets to decide who are rulers, who are serfs, and who gets to take what from whom without fear or consequence.

that said, it also cannot last. it will unerringly destroy plenty and comity and replace it with broken systems and societies of takers jockeying for power and grifting upon one another. the growth in people who consume more than they produce going exponential is an everything breaker. it cannot be supported fiscally. eventually you run out of other people’s money.

this new “pay to import shiftless immigrants who despise your culture” plan cannot work. whereas once immigration was an engine of growth, this new toxic form is a sinkhole of losses.

and denmark, frankly, looks better than the UK.

this economic stress is already becoming intolerable and will only rise. crime is off the charts especially violent crime, robbery, and rape.

and governments are refusing to allow this to be known, talked about, or objected to. sweden will not even let you gather data or publish it. racial stats are actually illegal in many parts of the EU (but AI is making short work of producing them anyway) you cannot hide this anymore by just refusing to have official stats (not that it stops people from trying to claim as much)

then you take a quick trip out to east london (newham) and you see this:

casual, high volume littering is one of the core third world social markers, a sign of zero community care and inability to cooperate or pass a marshmallow test or adhere to a golden rule. you can literally use it as a 99% first pass marker for neighborhoods and how they are going.

are you not culturally enriched?

there is simply no other way to see the wholesale importation of violent, dependent takers who do not share western values than “invasion.”

perhaps the “elites” that drive this have a genuine (albeit deluded) belief that “the world is flat” and that all people are the same and that when the third world comes to live with us they will become like us because in the past, a few exceptional third worlders did so, but this is looking increasingly threadbare as an excuse.

these are not the “we know it will be tough but we’re coming to pursue happiness at our own risk and on our own dime discriminate against me if you care to, but i’m going to make it anyway” grit possessing determination driven best and brightest high agency builders of past waves who sought to join a high function culture.

these are the grifters, the criminals, the fakers, and the takers. in some cases, it’s literally prisons being emptied. they come because being on the dole in the UK or france (or the US) is 10X the standard of living where they came from. so they come, and they bring and their cultures and crime come with them. rape and violence comes with them. sharia and sectarian violence comes with them. government as gang warfare comes with them.

and there is just no way “the elites” do not know this by now. they would not be suppressing statistics and speech like this if they did not know.

i leave it to you: viewed through the lens of rothbard, precisely what is being protected here?

where was the lie or even the mischaracterization?

why are irish teachers having the contents of their bank accounts seized for refusing to use the preferred pronouns of students?

why does UK law send stormtroopers to your house when you criticize a school but somehow have none left to go investigate large scale rape and sex trafficking rings preying upon minors? armed cops are raiding quaker meeting houses in london and arresting people having peaceful meetings.

all is not well, violence is running so high that the UK is banning swords and perhaps even kitchen knife ownership. (though i struggle to see that one actually being applied)

so, obviously, things are sort of absurd.

you have all the problems of a feudal system with none of the protection because the nobles are on the side of the brigands.

and somehow the answer is always more government in more layers and then some government for the governments laid on top.

so what is a respectable or reasonable european citizen to do? are you really just supposed to tolerate this in infinite amounts?

“vote harder” seems unlikely to work here.

it’s cute watching the EU talk about rebuilding militaries and becoming globally relevant again, but it’s not going to happen. they lack the money, the production capability, the development capability, and the basic sense. the UK has about as many functioning tanks as they have generals. (yes, really) most of europe could not successfully invade greenwich connecticut and wouldn’t even consider trying new haven. the last time the germans tried to build a tank, they made sure it was safe enough and had clean enough air that pregnant women could safety crew it. these are seriously unserious people.

but they certainly have the militarized police and police states to pick on and oppress an unarmed populace.

so let’s arm them.

“this end toward the fascists.”

we’ve done it before to help defend the european people from the european fascists and totalitarians. so let’s once more help our longtime allies and cultural cousins “the actual european people.” honestly, sneaking in piles of guns and seeing who wants one would be a helluva selector to see who is fren and who is still looking to get ruled a little harder. line forms to the right.

as i said above, sure, a great many europeans are not going to stand up, but some are. they are out there. you can see them, hear them. but they have no ally, no help.

perhaps they need some.

it would not take much to create a massive swing in the balance of power and if you could arm the good people of london like the bad people of baltimore, this whole thing would be over in a jiff.

when the police will not protect you, you need to protect yourself.

let’s send them the good stuff, a real marshall plan of self-sufficiency in self-defense of self-determination.

ethics is on our side.

the american second amendment is fundamental. it enshrines a natural right extant everywhere. it was not enumerated with a worry for “types of weapons” it was put to paper over worry about “types of governments.”

governments like these.

for if indeed we hold these truths to be self evident, then they are universal truths, not new-fangled new world privileges.

let us share our blessings of liberty and as once the french aided the ragtag american revolutionaries as they sought to throw off the yoke of english aristocratic and royal oppression, let us return the favor. maybe one day we can send them a statue to commemorate it.

i know it sounds crazy, but before you dismiss this idea out of hand, ask yourself this: is it actually any crazier than what we’ve been doing for the last 30 years of picking stupid fights, backing awful people, propping up corrupt dirtbags from central america to central europe, and arming the taliban so many times i’ve lost count?

really?

what if for once we thought outside the box, forgot the UN, forgot NATO, forgot the whole of this internationalist edifice of oppressive malfunction and graft and just stepped back and asked the real questions:

who are the good guys?

who and what is worth protecting?

who are the real allies of america, the people and systems we’d like to support?

and how can we best support them against those who would do them harm?

what do they need?

what would make them strong and allow them to flourish?

the US has armed a whole bunch of the crappiest, worst people on earth.

why not finally take the plunge and go arm some good ones?

it is said (cheekily) that “god made men, but sam colt made them equal.”

seems a fitting tool for overturning aristocracies.

water the tree of liberty? why, that’s just my game…

and look, the worst case scenario here is that we identify the liberty loving, high trust euros with a real acid test. the US has prospered greatly by skimming the cream off of europe several times before. we could always do it again and invite their best and brightest who share out values to come and share them and pursue their happiness over on our side of the sea. just the thing to bolster american values. hey, it worked last time…