Addicts

By now everyone in the world knows about ISIS’s immolation of captured Jordanian pilot Lt. Muath Al-Kaseasbeh. Most persons will also know that ISIS killed Lt. Kaseasbeh on January 3, and thus had been negotiating with the Jordanian government in the quintessence of bad faith. As of this morning, world reaction is essentially “on the record,” with nothing more to be added.

Supposedly, all the recognized governments of the Islamic Middle East are denouncing the atrocity, but inasmuch as Muslims will say anything at all that they think will serve the cause of world Islam, I’m inclined to discount their “outrage” as mere posturing for geostrategic reasons.

Here at home, we have Barack Hussein Obama stridently pontificating about the need for “greater vigilance,” however that might apply to confronting and defeating an enemy openly at war with us but which he won’t even name. Actions? A plan of campaign? Please! This is Obama we’re talking about.

But the most significant response to the atrocity has come from the governments of Europe.

“What response was that?” you say. Exactly what you’re thinking, Gentle Reader: None at all.

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A few months ago, I wrote about the unwisdom of our post-World-War-II military guarantees to other nations:

NATO, the military consequence of the North Atlantic Treaty, became a growing burden on American power and finances. At its peak, in combination with our security commitments to Japan, Taiwan, and several other states, it employed roughly a third of American combat power and consumed approximately half of all American military expenditures. We told ourselves those deployments were the indispensable bulwark against Communist expansion, the sole force capable of deterring aggression from the Soviet Union and Red China. And we were quite correct to think so.

Yet it was inevitable that those deployments would have a cumulative consequence for the priorities and behavior of the governments whose nations they shielded. Trusting that America would provide, they systematically underfunded and undermanned their own military establishments. The funds Europe would otherwise have put to military preparations went to expanding its welfare states: creating a culture of idlers and persons who disdained any responsibility for their own defense. Perhaps worst of all, the dynamic nourished political forces that blamed all international tensions on American militarism. In their view, the one and only enemy was the one whose sons stood ready to defend them.

The dynamic has produced a continent lousy with state-supported layabouts, and cultures to which things military are anathema. It no longer matters that they would refuse to defend their own nations, for they lack all power to do so. As for conflicts in other lands, they're inherently someone else's problem -- and probably America's fault.

Over the decades since the North Atlantic Treaty was ratified, the states of Europe have become addicted to American military protection. The desirability of creating and maintaining armed forces sufficient unto their own nations’ defense never enters the thoughts of the political masters of the Old World. It would mean transferring far too much money away from their welfare states and toward warlike things. It would elicit strident protests from their millions of layabouts and deafening outcries from the anti-military sectors of their electorates. But worst of all, it would deprive Europe’s political class of the ability to blame any and every ugly international incident on “American militarism.”

Europe’s silence toward the evils of world Islam, coupled to its reflexive blame-the-Americans response when confronted with Islam-powered tensions, has protected its access to Middle Eastern oil. That supply has become critical now that Vladimir Putin has demonstrated his willingness to use his control of the bulk of the continent’s natural gas supply for political leverage. Alongside that, the large Muslim sub-population of Europe is kept in a state the elite regard as tolerable, though Europeans whose cars and shops Muslims burn might disagree.

Europe’s addictions go beyond American guns, tanks, planes, and soldiers.

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Any number of self-help gurus preach the beauty of “living in the present.” Inasmuch as there’s nowhere else one can live, it would seem a foregone conclusion that one should make oneself comfortable there. But like all maxims, “live in the present” comes with a limiting principle that must not be overlooked.

The great Mark Steyn has written about Europe’s descent into self-extinction. Europeans’ low birth rates aren’t biologically determined. a la mode de P. D. James. They stem from a disinclination to reproduce. It arises from a present-moment attitude driven beyond rationality by the continent’s political devolution.

When “live for the present” becomes so imperative that one utterly forsakes all thought of the future, so also does it eschew all thought of:

• Redressing injustice;
• Protecting the oppressed and defending the beleaguered;
• Making provisions for future generations to enjoy what one has;
• Making future generations at all.

The implications for national policy are obvious:

• Passivity in the face of even the most atrocious crimes;
• Acquiescence to the formation of exclaves within one’s borders;
• Indifference to proper budgeting and to conditions that incentivize or disincentivize business and commerce;
• Utter disregard of conditions that discourage reproduction;
• A fierce and unrelenting grip upon whatever external sources of sustenance and protection exist at the moment.

Europe’s flaccidity in the face of the ongoing Islamic colonization of the continent is part and parcel of these attitudes and responses. The Old World has lost interest in the future. Its peoples regard their present moment as too comfortable to compromise with concerns for an era they will not see. Their political classes are aware of the upheaval that would result from any attempt to chivvy the continent back toward military self-sufficiency, economic dynamism, and cultural confidence. Though they never say so explicitly, they have ceded their continent’s future to the Muslim invader.

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Today, Barack Hussein Obama, who favors European social-fascist policies for the United States, sits in the Oval Office. His presence there ought to have disturbed Europeans’ slumbers, for Obama is the least inclined president since Warren Harding toward the active opposition of evil – especially the Islamic evil now swelling worldwide.

Europe can no longer rely upon the military protection it has come to expect from America.
America’s Obama-induced economic stall has deprived Europe of both goods and export markets.
European indifference to its own culture and to American culture have left it culturally vacuous.
How, then, could it oppose, much less defeat, a culturally confident invader determined upon conquest?

Europe’s addiction to its seemingly comfortable present has occasioned an even stronger addiction to military, economic, and cultural supports upon which it can no longer rely. Any European awake to the realities of geopolitics and the dynamics of cultural morphology should be shuddering at the implications...but how many such Europeans are there? Indeed, how many such Americans are there?

Verbum sat sapienti.