Saturday 4 July 2009

Conditions for a United Europe

I read something like this with a particular sense of dejavu. European geopolitics reminds me of the main character in "Memento" (actually, to push that metaphor further, one could cast the Church in the role of Joe Pantoliano's character, who is actually quite savvy and mostly trying to help but who the main character demonises and eventually kills, having chosen to forget his true motives). As that film demonstrated, people with memory always trump people who forget, no matter how noble their intentions. Without context, you make stupid mistakes. This is what Europe, whose memory seems to stop abruptly somewhere around 1939 (or, at most, 1789), seems intent on doing. Even when we're facing similar problems to 1000 years ago, it doesn't occur to anybody to study what happened then and learn from it (Of course, I'm not suggesting we do exactly what they did then- circumstances are different- but we can still learn from it, just like Napoleon could learn from Caesar). A line like this one utterly amazes me: "Europe has an appalling history of appeasing the Islamic Republic." Does no one remember the Crusades?

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