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The End of Europe?
Some of you told me they other day you’d prefer me to write more about Europe and less about Trump. Since I’ve got thousands of words of notes on my computer about Europe, I’ll try to oblige, although of course it’s impossible to write about the former without noting the latter’s effect upon it.
Our podcast guest the other day was Jamie Kirchick, the author of The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age. As it happens, I’d just published a review of his book in National Review. The subject of his book is very similar to the one I’m writing, so unsurprisingly, I found it thought-provoking; in fact, I found it essay-provoking; I ended up writing a chapter-length response to it. Of course, National Review couldn’t run a 5,000-word review. They ran what they thought were the best 1,800 words. (Mike Potemra, the book section editor, did a great job of choosing them.)
But as a result, some of the points I made in the review had to stand as assertions, rather than full arguments. Since one of our members asked about it, I decided to publish the original review. You can read the whole thing here:
Journalist James Kirchick’s first book is about Europe, not America, but throughout the reader will sense that it rests upon unvoiced axioms about America and its role in the world. These are axioms upon which no argument can rest confidently in the age of Donald Trump. As a consequence, although the book contains no obvious anachronisms, it feels as if it was written in another era, for a reader who no longer exists.
Kirchick was based in Prague and Berlin for much of the past decade, sending dispatches back to America about Europe and the former Soviet Union. During most of those years I did the same thing from Istanbul and Paris. Every writer imagines his readers; Kirchick’s imaginary readers seem to be much like mine. Call them Postwar Americans. Americans who feel it important to take a lively interest in the rest of the world, ones who are familiar, roughly, with the history of the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War, ones who instinctively feel the lessons of these catastrophes. Americans who elected such presidents as Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush; who understood that the relative global order in which Americans flourished for some seventy years did not emerge in sua sponte but was created, deliberately, by great postwar statesmen and maintained by American power, hard and soft.
The United States was at the center of a system designed to promote peaceful trade among reasonably decent and democratic people, and for the most part, it did. Those readers knew this system to be imperfect, but better than the alternatives. And they believed – wrongly, as it happened – that their country was sufficiently exceptional that such things as happened in Europe could not happen to them.
To the extent spectral qualities may be assigned to Donald Trump, there is a specter haunting this book …
I can only sympathize with Kirchick. I assume he wrote much of it well before Trump’s nomination, no less his election. I’m in the same boat. None of my theories about Europe, America, history, politics, or the world quite make sense in light of Trump; it seems I predicated them all on a massive initial error: the idea that America was too exceptional to fall victim to Europe’s pathologies. What does it mean that this is untrue?
I don’t know, and I’m no closer to knowing having read Kirchick’s book. But that’s not a fair criticism of it; it doesn’t purport to answer that question, and it doesn’t obviate his observations about the malignity of these trends in Europe. Still, the suppressed premise of the book is that these are exclusively European pathologies, and that suppressed premise is wrong. I sensed that a frantic, last-minute round of revisions and skillful editing brought the book largely up-to-date, but only superficially. The thing has a what-universe-are-you-living-in-Jamie quality.
Take the chapter about Germany. Much of it is devoted to the fallout of the Snowden revelations and the fit Germans pitched upon learning that Americans spy on them. Kirchick tells them to grow up: Everyone spies. What’s more, Germany needs to be spied upon, he argues, for Russia “continues to penetrate German politics, industry, media, intelligence, and armed forces.” Some German politicians, he notes, are particularly dodgy; Gerhard Schröder, for example, in 2004 declared Vladimir Putin “a flawless democrat,” and backed a loan guarantee for the Kremlin-backed gas pipeline Nord Stream. He subsequently took a post as chairman of the pipeline’s shareholders’ committee. That’s dodgy indeed. The “most concerning” aspect of the Nord Stream affair, Kirchick concludes, is that “Nord Stream puts the perceived national interest of Germany before solidarity with its democratic NATO and EU allies to the east by allowing Russia to restrict gas supplies to Eastern Europe while causing no pain to Western Europe.”
I’m sure you see where I’m going with this. Kirchick wrote that chapter for the reading audience I always thought I knew, people who didn’t need to be told why it’s a problem, big league, if Germany sells out its neighbors to the Russians, Rapallo-style. He continues in that vein: “When it comes to presenting a united front against Russian aggression and subversion, Germany’s Social Democrats are one of Europe’s weakest links.” He earnestly catalogues their flaws: “Signing a deal with an extortionist Russian energy concern and then taking a job on its board, lauding Vladimir Putin as a ‘flawless democrat,’ garlanding those who facilitate the exposure of America’s national security secrets, attacking NATO as a bunch of ‘warmongers’—such is the recent foreign policy record of German Social Democracy.” He assumes his readers won’t need to be told why this record is disturbing. But as we know now, they will. Germans, he continues, have taken to the streets to protest TTIP, their minds addled by hysteria, economic illiteracy, and recrudescent nationalism, so the NSA, he concludes, would be remiss not to spy on them. (We can expect to hear variants on this argument again and again in the coming days, thanks to the latest Putinleaks.)
I do understand: the book was due, the advance was paid, and you can’t call your publisher to say, “It seems we put Donald Trump in the Oval Office, and nothing I ever thought about anything makes any sense anymore. Let’s just throw this whole book out.” I admire Kirchick’s professionalism in plowing on as if the whole thing never happened. The show must go on.
And on it goes. He offers an entirely accurate account of the mendacity and bad faith of the charlatans who broke the United Kingdom, particularly Nigel Farage. “Farage’s sympathy for the Kremlin view of the world is long-standing,” he notes, “and comes naturally to a ‘Little Englander’ who seeks a diminished place for his country in global affairs.” (Again, the suppressed argument seems to be that Americans would never make the mistake of seeking a diminished place for their country in global affairs.) “It is incredible to behold Great Britain, which once occupied more than 20 percent of the earth’s landmass, moving ever closer to the brink of its own disintegration.” And if you thought that was incredible, reader, just you wait. …
I’d argue that Kirchick’s treatment of the EU is relatively weaker because he too has succumbed to exaggeration about the effects of the refugee crisis. Not everything you hear about the ill-effects of this influx is Russian propaganda, to be sure; it is a crisis. But a lot of what you hear is, in fact, for real, Russian propaganda. Look at the photo: This isn’t reds-under-the-beds paranoia, that is the Russian propaganda channel; and unsurprisingly, neither the photo nor the caption has anything to do with what the article purports. This is one reason I feel entitled to be as strident as I am about Trump even though I live in Europe: I can see for myself, right in front of my eyes, when Trump lies about Europe, or gets his information straight from Putinist outlets, and I can see the effect it has on our allies, on common decency, when he says these things. I too see the effects of Trump firsthand — just like you do, in other words — and they aren’t good. During the Cold War, the United States countered Soviet propaganda in Europe through such outlets as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty – Kirchick’s former employer. Breitbart now plans to expand into France and Germany with new bureaus to cultivate and promote Europe’s populist-nationalist, pro-Putin parties. Steve Bannon is now on the National Security Council; his name is almost synonymous with Breitbart, a news organization that plans actively to work against American interests in Europe. It is almost too strange to believe that the United States now seeks to amplify Russian propaganda rather than counter it.
One imagines that Kirchick wrote his denunciation of Europe’s short-sighted and protectionist trade policies, too, in that universe where American trade policy was far-sighted. “EU trade policies,” he writes, “protecting heavily subsidized domestic agricultural interests at the expense of third-world farmers hoping to export their goods to the common market—similarly increase migratory waves to Europe by pricing out producers from underdeveloped economies, thereby exacerbating poverty and economic torpor.” Quite! How could these foolish Europeans indulge this self-defeating impulse to protectionism? How fortunate are we Americans that we were born and weaned on The Weath of Nations and see right through these species of folly.
Except: We don’t.
I remember writing this kind of guide to the Old World, in the voice of an American who could observe Europe’s suicidal impulses with rueful detachment, grateful her country was not similarly afflicted, secure in the belief it never would be. “As was once said about the conquest of its erstwhile empire,” Kirchick writes of Europe, “Britain may bring about the collapse of Europe in a fit of absence of mind.” Though he does not say it, I immediately thought, “And America might bring about the collapse of the postwar order in a like moment of absent-mindedness.”
Anyway. Despite my reservations about some of his arguments, I do recommend the book, though I also recommend carefully checking the references, particularly in the chapter on France. I especially recommend his chapter on Hungary. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, he writes, has presided over a campaign to obscure “both the specifically anti-Jewish nature of the Holocaust and the Hungarian state’s active collaboration in mass murder,” one that features “government-sponsored historical institutes, publicly funded documentaries, revisions to school curricula, bestowal of state honors to extreme right-wing figures, and erections of public monuments and museum exhibitions,” all functioning to obscure Jewish victimhood. Jews do tend to be the canary in the coalmine. Yesterday, Orban said that “ethnic homogeneity” was key in fostering economic success, and “too much mixing causes trouble.” You cannot both admire these sentiments and complain that the left calls you a racist. (Or you can, but it makes no sense.)
As the historian Lewis Namier observed, there is a morphology of politics; certain forms occur and re-occur. Historical revisionism appears to be intrinsic to the form that Kirchick terms Orbánism. But you could also call it Putinism or Erdoğanism. Contemporary political scientists describe it as illiberal democracy, partial democracy, low intensity democracy, empty democracy, and hybrid democracy. Namier called it plebiscitary Caesarism,
with its direct appeal to the masses: demagogical slogans ; disregard of legality in spite of a professed guardianship of law and order; contempt of political parties and the parliamentary system, of the educated classes and their values; blandishments and vague, contradictory promises for all and sundry; militarism; gigantic, blatant displays and shady corruption. Panem et circenses once more and at the end of the road, disaster.
The cultivation of nostalgia for an authoritarian past, Kirchick writes, and he is right to do so, tends to presage an authoritarian future: Orbán’s government “has rewritten the constitution, centralized power in the executive, weakened checks and balances, empowered an oligarchic class, dispensed state awards and ceded cultural policy to extreme right-wing figures, rendered parliament a rubber stamp, overhauled public media institutions into partisan outlets, harassed civil society, and reoriented Hungary’s traditionally Atlanticist and pro-European foreign policy toward Russia and other authoritarian regimes.”
It’s easier to do this in countries with a shorter (or no) tradition of liberal democracy, to be sure; it isn’t so easy to do in America. But it is the goal of such personalities to do it. I leave it to you to read the book and decide whether it’s too familiar for comfort. I think it is.
Published in General
This is a slippery slope fallacy. Arguments for some kind of homogeneity do not, out of necessity, slip into genocidal mania and to shut down such discussions out of fear that they might is bigotry as classically defined.
Let the arguments out and have at the debate. Genocide is evil. Seeking to preserve an already existing homogeneity may be a valid course of action to prevent future conflict that could end in bloodshed.
THANK YOU!!!
All the intellectual preening about the destruction of the free world under a Trump presidency and he’s not even 50 days in office?
I suppose the underlying question here is: is it legitimate for a Hungarian politician to want to preserve Hungary as a nation where the majority of the population speak Hungarian, practice Christianity, eat Goulash, and so forth?
Of course one fear is that if Muslim immigrants became a majority of the population, they might democratically elect a government that would impose Sharia law and reshape the laws and institutions of Hungary to reflect the countries they came from. But even assuming that “expecting integration and respect for the country and its laws” actually works and that the immigrant population learns to respect and love liberal democracy, would a Muslim-majority, Arabic-speaking, etc. nation still be in any meaningful sense “Hungarian?” Even if the laws don’t change, but the people, language, culture, customs, cuisine, and so forth all change, is Hungary still Hungarian?
Or is it inherently racist to care about such things?
I tend to roll my eyes at some of the overblown Trump criticism, but I’d like to point out that I did intellectual preening about the destruction of the free world under a Hillary presidency, and she wasn’t even in office 1 day. And I think I was right to do so.
Islam is a belief system. So are Christianity, democracy, rule of law, capitalism, or love of Hungarian customs. Beliefs are not derived from race, so objections to them are not racist.
If one prioritizes laws — that is, if one insists that laws rather than beliefs and traditions make a nation — then a nation is a government with a people. That is a materialist view which reduces politics to a vicious contest of powers (“might makes right”). America’s founders insisted that Americans are a people (or peoples) with a government. Thus, beliefs and customs take precedence and are what define us. Thus, good character and community are emphasized over legal force.
Multiculturalism is a corruption of the good impulses to be welcoming and self-giving. It pretends that tolerance of minority beliefs and practices does not rely on a stable and generous cultural majority. It pretends that all cultures are equally benevolent, all customs are tolerable, and all belief systems are basically equivalent. It pretends demographics are inconsequential. It is suicidal.
Is this guy more racist than the American Democrat whom Claire voted for (Hillary Clinton), who identifies every person and problem by genetics? I doubt it.
True. But recognizing the ideological link and questioning the morality of a position is not.
Agree – we can’t keep beating the drum beats of the past. That’s why I’m hoping Claire “Claire”ifies her worries – some may be exaggerated but some may be worth paying close attention to – there is a feeling in the air that history is repeating in many ways.
If we highlight what is the same, we should also be burdened with highlighting differences and analyzing if they have a significant difference. Even subtle differences can hold vastly different consequences.
Orban recognizes that there is some diversity in Hungary and embraces it as a strength while also holding to an ideal that even in that diversity, there is some homogeneity. His reluctance to open his borders does not translate well into wanting to kill off the diversity in his own country. He also (at least in what was quoted) doesn’t claim cultural superiority or a vision to spread that culture and race to the world.
As opposed to Hillary, who favored U.S. immigration policies that would cement Obama’s total transformation.
And first as the First Lady of the Clinton crime family, her corruption upgraded China’s missile technology and then, as Obama’s Secretary of State, Russia’s high tech weaponry.
Perhaps her loyalty is purely episodic and is on an individual transactional basis and is not purchased permanently, so had she won, we would not have been electing a Russian or Chinese puppet to the White House. Perhaps once in office her loyalties would be those of any Leftist Democrat. Anyway, maybe arming America’s potential enemies is really a good thing, because the betrayal degraded America’s dangerous hyperpuissance.
But be that as it may, none of that history deterred @claire from considering Hillary the lesser evil in November. That should enter into our judgement of her opinions of European politicians.
She continues to be a conscientious reporter, though being a very busy public intellectual may at times rely on what she once learned rather than checking for updated scholarship on everything she writes.
That’s the danger of knowing a lot about a lot of fields… and then not just popping off to your friends but putting your broad synthesis out there. Sometimes you’re overtaken by events a more narrow specialist would be aware of.
The invention and use of the term “RINOCare” is an excellent description of the disease that is affecting the body politic. The scenario, egged on by the Mark Levin crowd: 1) Imagine an outcome that is borderline horrific for much of the population but matches the fevered dreams of those purists who revere 1924; 2) assume that the only reason it is not effected immediately is spineless disloyalty of the “sellouts and consultants” rather than the, er, filibuster; 3) go nuclear to prevent any action whatever; 4) blame the rational realists for the resulting electoral carnage.
All brought to you by the gang that still thinks Medicare Part D was the worst Republican action of the last 50 years and that Romney was a leftist in Massachusetts.
Sounds like a gang I might want to be part of, but what if I don’t think Medicare Part D was quite the worst Republican action of the last 50 years? Probably in the top ten, though. Top twenty for sure. Can I at least get an associate membership?
You may perhaps be interested in the correspondence that ensued from Radosh’s criticism:
Closed Minds: A response to Ron Radosh, et al — my response
Radosh’s response to my response
City Journal then published a forum with my response to Radosh’s response to my response, along with all the letters they received in response to the controversy, and responses from Bukovsky and Stroilov (they took my side, obviously). Unfortunately, it no longer seems to be on their site. (If anyone can find a cached copy anywhere, I’d be grateful to have it for my files.)
The Economist writes about our exchange
More (by me) about the documents in question
Another article I wrote about Stroilov’s archive and its relevance to the Middle East
Previous discussions about this on Ricochet
And for those who never read the original article: A Hidden History of Evil.
Finally, if any of you have never read it, Bukovsky’s masterpiece, To Build a Castle, is now available in a new edition, on Kindle. It’s one of the great books of the 20th Century, and sadly, profoundly relevant to the times we’re living through.
I didn’t know about this controversy. I’ve now read all the articles to which you provided links, and have downloaded Bukovsky’s book. Your original article makes me more glad than ever of Brexit and of the efforts to limit the power and scope of the EU.
Thank you for the links. I don’t know how I missed your 2012 piece. I should have known better than to trust Radosh on something like this. I apologize. I must say that your
in your CJ piece was a nice zinger to Radosh whose CPUSA membership through his 20s testifies to his willful blindness to Stalin’s crimes.
It’s funny that this should crop up now, since I was just revisiting Stanton Evans’ book on McCarthy. I had just noticed another instance of a conservative writer talking about “McCarthyism” and “205 names.” I found Evans’ account of the notorious list convincing years ago, but wound up reminding myself of the curiously selective holes in archives that would have vindicated McCarthy’s veracity, though, sadly not have kept him from self-destructing in the face of the concerted attack he faced.
I remember Isaac Don Levine’s quip in, I think, Eyewitness to History that if McCarthy hadn’t come along the Communists would have had to invent him.
Levine also described a building in the Shah’s Iran built around a clandestine Communist printing press (there were pieces of the machine too big to get through any of the doors) so the USSR’s interest in Iran was no surprise.
The first thing the Ayatollah did was kill all the Communists. Not call them names, not chase them off into the boonies, not lock them up — kill.
And you thought that there was nothing admirable about the man.
Don’t know about Europe, but your healthcare and gun violence issues lose you respect in Australia.
That’s all right. We’re laughing at your self-inflicted power shortages. Almost as bad as the fiasco with the Oroville dam in California.
Good for us.
Tonight, I’ll sob bitterly with shame and regret before I sleep like a baby.
Any nation that cannot project military power has no serious right to look down on America for anything. The only reason any other nation enjoys it’s freedom is because American forces keep the seas safe.
No Us ally pulls it’s weight. Period. Without America, Europe and Australia would not be free today. Period.
Personally, I don’t think we remind them enough of their debt.
Don’t know about Europe, but your healthcare and gun violence issues lose you respect in Australia.
–Its easy to be smug when you have America doing the heavy lifting. Also being surrounded on all sides by water, and only importing rich white people certainly helps.
Well my goodness, aren’t we sensitive today!!
FSC said that Europe didn’t care about your health care issues – and perhaps they don’t- but not running things well at home does have an impact on how competent other people believe you to be. Accurately or not.
Now shall I call the wahmbulance for you?
If somebody could figure out how to combine competence in running things with human rights, then we’d have something.
This is absolutely true, and fair or not, it costs us. The impression that Americans are incompetent at governing themselves and insanely violent is a propaganda bonanza for adversaries and demoralizing to allies. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. We can debate the relative importance of soft power versus hard power for ages, and academics do, but it would be foolish to say there’s no such thing as soft power or that it’s insignificant. We still hold the second-highest ranking in soft power, by most measures (the EU as a whole holds the top), but ours is a diminishing share. Our high rates of violence, imprisonment (the highest in the world), indebtedness, poverty, and drug addiction; our inability to agree to a health care policy with which we’re reasonably happy; our own dissatisfaction with our government; the way we portray ourselves in our own pop culture; and our election of a president who issues misspelled Tweets from the can at 3:00 am — all of this diminishes our soft power. This in turn makes it more likely, although how much can’t be quantified, that we’ll be forced to resort to hard power. This seems an obvious and even trivial observation.
The true whiners are the people who snip at America, safe under our nuclear umbrella.
The left is determined to portray America in as negative light as possible. On all of these subjects, there is distortion. Let’s take this by the numbers shall we:
Our high rates of violence,
There are several factors driving this, and none have easy fixes. If you have some simple fixes, by all means, lets put them into the comments. I do think we could help this, by not bringing in refugees. At least we don’t have 1000’s of sexual attacks on some holidays. And, I am not sure it is true:
http://www.germanjoys.eu/2015/10/violent-crime-is-more-common-in-europe-than-the-usa.html
According to this, we are pretty much the same. It is homicide that puts us over the top. I found several other studies saying similar things. Murders, especially by guns, especially minorities killing minorities, is our big crime problem. I do not know how to solve that, since we have a God Given right to our guns. Of course, one might disagree and think our guns should be taken from us to help our soft power.
I am not sure why homicide started to go up in the 1960’s. However, my guess is, it has to do with the destruction of the family, a charge led by the very types of people sitting in Europe wanting to lecture us about “soft power”
I do think the general Freedoms we have, have a shadow. America has a more violent culture than Europe (domestically, Europe has a culture of trying to destroy the world with wars).
imprisonment (the highest in the world)
That pretty much goes with the first part, doesn’t it? I know who we have locked up. Most of them really need to be there and not out on the streets. Most killers have already committed a crime. We could have less murders if we had heavier incarceration.
indebtedness
The entire Western World has this problem. America carries more debt because it pays for the EU’s defense. Imagine, if for the past 70 years, the nations of the EU pulled their own weight. Certainly the EU has several nations in peril, that are supported by taking money from one people to give to another, in an undemocratic way.
poverty
Poverty is relative. I once had a MBA candidate from a sister school tell me “I want to go to America to see a poor person who is fat!” I work with the least of the least. Let me tell everyone this: If you are not homeless, you get more than enough to eat. You have clean drinking water, you have a TV, you have power, you have a cell phone (maybe even a smart phone), you have some access to health care via the ER. In short, someone below the poverty line in America is still pretty well off compared to the world.
drug addiction
Because of course, this is not a problem anywhere else? The proposed solutions I see on Ricochet would all result in increased rates of addiction.
our inability to agree to a health care policy with which we’re reasonably happy;
This is called democracy. Apparently, we have too much of it. I am not sure the the EU has squared this circle either, just that the people are more content with what they get, and Americans are more demanding. Hard to tell, since what I know of other nations is that people love their health care and things are great. And then I hear things are not. I do know that what the citizens of our republic want is not doable. Republics never get things like this sorted out right until they have too. If we were less of a republic, and more of a technocratic state, I suppose this would be settled.
our own dissatisfaction with our government
I wear this with pride. How un-America to think we should be happy with our government. We should always be unhappy and vigilant. Price of Liberty and all that.
the way we portray ourselves in our own pop culture
This is a mixed bag. I suppose an office of censorship could control this. It is the left who makes all these decisions though, and they clearly hate America, so it comes as no surprise that we might look bad.
our election of a president who issues misspelled Tweets from the can at 3:00 am
A couple of thoughts on this. Americans and Europeans have different standards of decorum. I am surprised the French are not celebrating a US President with a messy marriage history like the sort of person they like to elect. I know that half the nation cannot stand Trump either, mostly from the left, and the people who just don’t like the cut of his jib. The thing is, half the nation has decided that they wanted something new, with the idea the old order (of which most of the EU is totally invested) is no longer working.
all of this diminishes our soft power. This in turn makes it more likely, although how much can’t be quantified, that we’ll be forced to resort to hard power. This seems an obvious and even trivial observation.
I remember West German students protesting American nukes on their soil. It pissed me off then. Here America was paying to keep them safe from the USSR, and they protested us. We were protecting their right to protest. Later, the EU and those in the circles of their order had warrants for Bush and Cheney? Really?
Nothing counts in the world but Hard Power. Nothing. The EU and the rest of the world only gets to complain and look down on America because of our Hard Power. Where is the EU’s Soft Power when it comes to managing Russia? How is the Soft Power of the EU changing things for the better in Turkey? I do see where the EU uses its Soft Power to make things worse in the Middle East, because they hate Israel. I do see where they use their Soft Power to advance non-democratic, technocratic agendas.
I have demonstrated above, that the items you list as problems are bugs (or features) of being a republic with an eye on freedom and liberty, instead of an eye on order. The the people of the EU want order and security more than they want freedom, that is their choice. I do not think, however, that Americans should look to such a diminished people for approval. We are the greatest, most powerful, most dynamic nation ever to exist in the History of Mankind. Our race is not yet run, and their is Power in us yet. Europe’s day is done, its best spent in pointless wars, its people’s no longer are inspired by their own great history.
I’ll take our Hard Power over the Soft Power of decline, any day of the week.
The US has ceded soft power because the left has authored the narrative about it, and it is endlessly repeated by the organs of its official culture, from the New York Times to the academy to the State Department. Which is why I have called for more government resources (gasp!) to be dedicated to explaining – or even asserting – to the world that America (the real America, not the icky blue bits on the edges) is wonderful. Especially the second amendment. And sticking to the first amendment would be a wonderful thing, too.
I hear lots of examples of high crime happening in Europe and people just not bothering to report it, because the police at best will do nothing, and at worst come after you for rocking the boat.
We have all heard stories of how people are arrested for assaulting the thieves breaking into there property.
I wonder how much crime in the banlieues is even reported anymore?
I guess everybody feels underappreciated :-(
See, from my pov Australians have fought and died in every war that the US has asked them to – Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan – and they’ve done that whether they thought these wars were good ideas or stupid and unnecesssary, because that’s the price of the alliance. We understand it. We pay it. There’s no real difference wrt that on either side of mainstream politics here.
It’s human for me to be more aware of that than on appparently not showing enough gratutude by not being critical. I suppose it’s human for you to be more aware of the criticism.