What Is Really Destroying Europe? The EU…

Authored by Drieu Godefridi via The Gatestone Institute,

The founding idea of the European Union was to build, through shared prosperity, solidarity and a sense of shared destiny among the nations of Europe. That was why three communities were formed: the economy, coal and steel, and nuclear energy. Until around 2000, in terms of growth and innovation, the European economy, year in, year out, was on par with the American one.

Of that initial — and fairly brilliant — gesture of “peace through prosperity,” literally nothing remains. None of the EU’s current leaders cares about the financial well-being of Europeans. Coal is regarded as the devil’s fuel, and nuclear energy is abhorred by Europe’s elites, who say they prefer the inefficient and erratic wind turbines. Since 2000, the European economy has been mired in stagnation, which has worsened since 2008 and threatens to reach its height in the coming years — ending in the destruction of Europe.

Green Deal

The EU is a web of institutions with which an American would find nothing familiar, so let us just say that this web is dominated by one institution: the European Commission. It is a kind of European “government’” with a monopoly on legislative initiatives. Nothing is voted on in the EU without the Commission’s assent.

The Commission makes no secret of the fact that its absolute priority is the Green Deal: to turn Europe into a “Carbon Neutral Society” by 2050. This means achieving a balance between the greenhouse gas emissions produced and those absorbed by natural or technological carbon sinks. The EU’s key strategies to achieve this balance include reducing emissions by massively increasing the use of “renewable energy” sources such as solar, wind, hydro and biomass, improving the energy efficiency of buildings, vehicles and industries, and moving towards low- or zero-emission industrial processes, particularly in steel, cement and chemicals. They also aim to develop carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies to absorb and store CO2 from combustion sources or from the air. Carbon dioxide captured is typically stored in geological formations such as depleted natural gas fields, or old coal mines. In Europe, the North Sea seabed serves as an ideal location for carbon storage.

The problem is that these CCS technologies are extremely expensive. Imposing them in the gigantic way that zero-carbon requires implies additional costs that are impossible for any developed economy to digest. That is probably why these fantastical CCS technologies play such a marginal role in Europe. The truth is that the reduction in CO2 emissions in Europe is almost exclusively due to industry leaving Europe. That is the dirty little secret of the Green Deal: Europe is reducing its CO2 emissions to the extent and in proportion to the destruction of its industry.

The industry destroyed in Europe, however, is immediately reborn elsewhere in the world: in East Asia, South America and, of course, the United States. This means that the CO2 emissions destroyed in Europe reappear as if by magic somewhere else — before the products of that particular industry are re-exported to Europe. In the majority of cases — because transporting anything emits CO2 – the balance sheet in terms of this European sleight of hand in reducing global CO2 emissions is negative.

The stated motive and reason for being of the Green Deal is to save the climate, which in European circles is often spelled with a capital C – “Climate” — which says a lot about the religiosity of the whole approach. To “save the planet,” we are told, we need to reduce CO2 emissions.

The only technological way we know so far to reduce CO2 emissions is by nuclear power. The EU “elites,” however, hate nuclear power: their real objective is not to mitigate climate change and “save the planet”, but to force an exit from capitalism and return to the subsistence economy that has always been the ambition, the dream and the horizon of environmentalists — long before there was any talk of global warming. “Capitalism is killing the Planet”, wrote The Guardian.

Freedom of speech

If there is one reality that leaders whose power is founded on myths abhor, it is transparency. Whereas in 2020, the power of the American legacy media still allowed it to make people believe that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian disinformation operation, over the last few years, this power was been reduced to shreds. The same shift is happening in Europe, under the influence not of European social media networks, because they do not exist, but of American ones, such as X. The EU elite has lost control of the narrative. Europeans are turning away from the lies and myths of the Green Deal en masse.

This is what the EU cannot tolerate. By adopting the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU wanted to give itself an instrument with which to subdue the American platforms, and are obliged to fund hordes of censors to hunt down content that disagrees with the European Queen-Commission. The EU has been requiring a fine of 6% of worldwide revenue from social media companies, which would inevitably kill off the platforms.

These faceless censor-hunters, who are accountable to no one, are supposed to remove all content that is hateful, discriminatory or transphobic. None of these vague terms can be rigorously defined. Given the absence of precise definitions, the censors do whatever they want. The arbitrariness is total. In practice, these censors massively quash so-called “right-wing” content, while leaving the abundant anti-Semitic, Islamist and Marxist literature untouched.

That, apparently, is the whole point. The European Left, like the American Left, devotes unlimited antagonism to anything that does not think like it, talk like it, dream, eat or work like it.

By introducing legislation such as the DSA, Europe is asserting itself as a major player in the censorship camp, following the example of China, Iran, Russia and Islamist countries, and contributing to the de-civilization of the European continent. After all, isn’t freedom the definition, the reason for being and the sole distinguishing criterion of Western civilization?

Open borders

Not a week goes by in Europe without an illegal immigrant, a recent migrant, an asylum seeker or an Afghan who is here without anyone knowing in what capacity, deliberately mowing down pedestrians, stabbing young women or massacring infants and young children in a crib. Europe is experiencing the worst crisis of migratory anarchy since the Norman and Islamic invasions of the High Middle Ages.

This anarchy is not a natural calamity. It is the result of a series of political decisions, shared between the EU, the European Court of Human Rights and the member states. The EU in particular, being a borderless market, has created and developed an external border guard service, FRONTEX. The problem is that, as European law currently stands (EU + ECHR), these border guards essentially provide a free ferry service between Africa and Europe. European law expressly prohibits them from turning back illegal immigrants when they are intercepted. They are obliged to bring them into the European Union so that they can exercise all their “rights”.

In Europe, even more than in the USA, once an illegal immigrant is in the country, in the overwhelming majority of cases, they stay — millions of them. Europeans watch in amazement as their proud cities — Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Rome, London — undergo demographic metamorphoses in real time, while hate-filled crowds march regularly through their streets shouting anti-Semitic slogans, “death to the Jews” and other benedictions borrowed from their friendly native culture.

Can the EU be saved?

One reason for democracy to exist is to allow a peaceful change of leadership and policy. In the last European Parliament elections, Europeans voted massively to the right, evidently in reaction and fury against the policies of the European Commission under Ursula von der Leyen. What enraged voters is the Green Deal, which makes energy unaffordable, and the migratory chaos, now heavily tinged with Islamism and hatred of Jews.

What came out of those elections? A new von der Leyen Commission! With a different program? No, with a program that is even more radical, environmentalist and censorious than the first von der Leyen Commission. It is as if Americans voted 60% Republican, and the president then appointed was a socialist. How can this be, when Europe claims to swear by “democracy”?

Because of two factors, it seems. The first: the largest group in the European Parliament is the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP). This group is numerically dominated by Germany’s CDU/CSU – the party of former Chancellor Angela Merkel. Her party, however, is to the left of the US Democratic Party on most issues. Its support for the most obtuse environmentalism, and the Green Deal in particular, appears total. Therefore, when it came to imposing a new president of the European Commission after the June 2024 elections, the CDU/CSU chose someone from within its ranks who maintains strong environmentalist convictions: Ursula von der Leyen.

The second and most important factor is that the EU is, in reality, a Potemkin democracy. It looks like a democracy, but is in fact an authoritarian bureaucracy. There is no election by the citizens of a parliament worthy of the name, no transparency, no recourses and, it seems, no way of eliminating the organization or any part of it. European citizens can vote as they please, but it is a self-appointed elite within the European institutions who decide the future of Europe. These “elites” will do anything to keep themselves and their ideology in power. Last week, the Dutch daily De Telegraaf revealed that the first von der Leyen Commission had massively financed environmental NGOs to put pressure on members of the European Parliament — long live the separation of powers! — and citizens in favor of the Green Deal.

In addition, Qatar has massively infiltrated the European Parliament, buying parliamentarians to promote its interests and its Islamist vision of the world. Whether people vote left or right, it makes no difference: Von der Leyen and her far-left environmentalist agenda are still in power. Can one measure the sense of alienation that must be felt by Europeans, forced to finance a corrupt bureaucracy working against their interests?

When it comes to migration, the economy, free speech and democracy, the EU is not the solution to any problem. The EU is the problem.