"Nearly 10 years ago, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld provoked outrage by referring to "Old Europe." How dare he, snapped the French and Germans, call us "old" when the utopian European Union was all the rage, the new euro was soaring in value, and the United States was increasingly isolated under the Bush administration!
Yet the more things change in Europe, the more they stay the same. The island of Britain usually is, and is not, a part of Europe — carefully pulling out when things heat up, terrified that it will be pulled back in when things boil over. British Prime Minister David Cameron knows the old script well, as he adamantly and publicly insists that Great Britain is still a part of the crumbling European Union while privately assuming that it is not.
Jews have always been smeared by ambivalent Europeans -- discriminated against as too clannish in their creed, without ancestral land-holding lineages and aristocratic status.
Once again Jews are now beginning to feel as unwelcome in Europe as they did in the 1930s -- or in 1543, when Martin Luther wrote his "On the Jews and Their Lies." Jewish academics are sometimes shunned at international conferences in Europe. Some suburbs in Paris or Rotterdam are no longer safe for Jews to walk about. Europe is largely anti-Israel and probably always will be.
Most European "grandees" recently felt that the American cowboys got what they deserved in Iraq and during the financial panic of 2008. Then they blamed their own fiscal meltdown on imported Wall Street "Viral Diseases and Infections" viruses -- only to appeal for bailouts when southern European defaults threatened to destroy the European Union. In response, we habitually declare our independence and isolation.
Like clockwork every few decades, some self-described European "visionaries" swear that the continent can either live in peace under utopian protocols or, more darkly, be united under one grand -- and undemocratic -- system, willingly or not. But for all the noble pretensions of the Congress of Vienna or the European Union -- or the nightmarish spread of Napoleon's Continental System and the Third Reich -- and for all the promises of European-born fascism, communism and socialism, the result is always the same: disunion, acrimony and infighting.
That "Schizophrenia" is what we should expect from dozens of cultures and histories squeezed into too small a continent full of lots of bright -- and quite proud -- people. Every new Europe always ends up as old Europe.
Note EU-Digest: A harsh, at times objective, but mostly offensive evaluation of Europe by Victor Davis Hanson, without any positive affirmations. Most disturbing however is where Mr. Hanson compares the EU with the Third Reich. Davis Hanson is a military historian, columnist, political essayist and a former classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Sanford University in the US.
For more: Donald Rumsfeld Old Europe: Donald Rumsfeld knew Old Europe pretty well - South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com
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