The crowbar of events.

Yulia Latynina on the European unraveling:

It is not just Greece or the euro that is coming apart at the seams. We are witnessing the unraveling of the whole philosophy of European bureaucratic socialism, which by some unfortunate misunderstanding considers itself a democracy.^[1]

Takuan Seiyo on unsustainability:

. . . Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain, Japan, United Kingdom, Baltics, Belgium, France, United States. . . . All are pigs that have been trifling with basic rules of common sense reality, bequeathing a crumbling global Babel to their subjects jointly and severally.

The acronym [PIGS] initially contained Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain, later added Italy, but that is not nearly enough. 16 countries in the Eurozone have deficits more than twice the allowed 3% limit, with heavy debt burdens and limited ability to sell more debt paper. Wherever one looks in the global economy, one sees nothing but a trail of erroneous premises and fraudulent promises – 45 years of rule by the criminals and the utopians, the crooks and the Body Snatchers, all in a pile in that Western jalopy careening toward the immutable majesty of Reality.

According to Mr. Seiyo, the model is this:

• coddling of workers unions,
• shafting employers,
• tolerating a slack work ethic,
• granting generous unemployment and retirement benefits,
• providing public health care,
• embracing high taxation,
• enlisting a crushing burden of bureaucracy, and
• at all times ignoring the disincentives to entrepreneurship inherent in all of the above.

And this model is essentially a cancerous growth.

In 1978, Alexander Solzhenitsyn warned that there is in the West an exclusion of unfashionable ideas that silences independent-minded people, stops development, forestalls national renewal and salvation, and leads to a dangerous blindness. "There is . . . a self-deluding interpretation of the contemporary world situation. It works as a sort of petrified armor around people's minds. Human voices from 17 countries of Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia cannot pierce it. It will only be broken by the pitiless crowbar of events.”^[3] He was talking of the communist threat to freedom but the armor exists to shield Westerners from other unpleasant realities.

For Mr. Seiyo, the armor is the Western acceptance of a national political model that must fail. Forty-five years of following this model find Western countries speeding to a nasty end, with entire societies oblivious. They are committed to the model to the end and will permit no reversal of course.

Even now, the dire economic picture that Mr. Seiyo paints for Europe is still not enough to cause a reevaluation of the model:

What Germany is not considering is overhauling its tax-and-redistribute fiscal premises that must derail it eventually.^[4]

Democratic governments of the post-WWII era are simply incapable of tackling unsustainability head on. The lock of unions, bureaucrats, and other citizens benefiting from socialist largesse is simply unbreakable short of a train wreck.

Nor is there anything in the U.K. elections today that hints at an appreciation of how the ground has shifted. Reagan’s mindless “It’s Morning in America” slogan for his reelection campaign will work for all but the BNP and maybe the UKIP. Barring some hitherto undetectable epiphany on the part of the electorate, the election will change nothing because no change has been proposed.

Other more powerful events will drive change there and throughout Europe, even before the tipping point of Muslim demographic inundation is reached. Mixed economies have retained sufficient productive capacity to spread many benefits around, if thinly. When European economies become a zero sum proposition, the angry demonstrations of the privileged Greek public employees may be seen elsewhere. Maybe this will be the crowbar. But one way or another there will be a crowbar.

Cultural and criminal assaults have hitherto failed to accomplish anything remotely like that public, organized anger of the Greek public sector, unless banning minarets and burkas counts as a political tectonic shift. Maybe economic pain will be more provocative than the challenges from contemptible, aggressive, freeloading Muslims.

No. New leadership is decidedly not much in evidence as witness the pathetic U.K. (and French) “conservatives” -- and the rest of the currently dominant European parties. Even when anger comes, where will it take Europe? Maybe the aborigines will summon up some measure of national pride or instinct for self preservation.

But it's not at all clear that that will be how change will play out. If it's true that the "Euro is doomed," that may presage either a great unraveling or a 21st-century Reformation. If it's the latter, I think the present enormous departure from our European spiritual, economic, and historical antecedents will ensure that the transition from the confusion of an unraveling to a Reformation will last a very long time.

Notes
^[1] "Another Munich Agreement." By Yulia Latynina, The Moscow Times, 5/3/10.
^[2] "From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 13 (4): Harpo, Gekko, Barko, Sarko." By Takuan Seiyo, Brussels Journal, 3/10/10 (emphasis added, footnote omitted).
^[3] Harvard University address. By Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1978.
^[4] Seiyo, op. cit.