IN ALL FAIRNESS, IT SHOULD BE ACKNOWLEDGED...:

Eurozone crisis: the US has to ride to the rescue once again (Janet Daley,  03 Dec 2011, The Telegraph)

So, once again, the United States has intervened to save Europe from itself. And there we were thinking that the old 20th-century pattern had been eradicated. The Federal Reserve Bank made floods of cheap dollars available last week, having come to the blood-curdling conclusion that the global banking system could only be saved from catastrophic collapse by sending in the American cavalry - Europe's own governing class being apparently incapable of effective action. [...]

In truth, it is almost impossible to understand the European dilemma because it is so arcane - so weighed down with historical accretions and ideological obscurantism - that it has become impenetrable even to the principal players in what is turning into a tragedy of monumental proportions. The original plan was designed out of remorse on the one hand - to heal Europe's ancient hatreds - but also to ensure that the unified power of the new European bloc would be a check on the overweening might of the United States. Instead, the old enmities and suspicions have been energetically revived and the US has, with its usual reluctance and misgivings, been forced to come to the rescue. Isn't this where we came in? The French foreign minister, Alain Juppé, said last week that war on the Continent could recur. It was unclear whether this was intended as a warning or a threat.

To Americans, an inability to escape from the past is incomprehensible: theirs is a country composed entirely of people who did exactly that. But Europe is populated by the people who did not leave, whose collective memory is imbued with either blood-and-soil national identity, or a proud sense of historical mission. It was a mistake to think that all this could be expunged as an act of political will by a single generation which saw itself as uniquely enlightened. Like most benign oligarchies, the EU built this new entity on what it thought to be morally unimpeachable, immutable principles: the provision of universal security which would prevent populations from descending into fractured, hostile factions. Civil unrest - and the terrible international crimes to which it gave rise - would be eradicated for ever by a system of social engineering and welfare that would provide permanent well-being (and so, permanent peace).

...that the Marshall Plan supplied the money for that welfare experiment precisely because we wanted them to die off quietly without our having to intervene again.  To a significant extent it succeeded.  Today we're buying them off instead of sending our sons there to die for them.



Posted by oj at December 4, 2011 6:24 AM
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