Europe’s Terminal Decline: The Philosopher Queens and Their Ruinous Rule
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen faced two more challenges to her position in the European Parliament last week. She received support from just over half the members of the 720-seat European Parliament in both votes. Neither of the motions of no confidence had a chance of securing the two-thirds majority required to eject the President but still they served as the latest reminder of the increasingly fractured European Parliament and its growing populist factions.
The Patriots for Europe group, a conservative-populist faction which participated in the parliamentary motion, includes lawmakers from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party and the Rassemblement National (RN) party of Marine Le Pen in France. It criticised the EC’s climate, migration and economic policies. The conservative faction in European politics parallels President Trump’s characteristically blunt address to the United Nations. He had described Europe as “going to hell” through its twin obsessions with mass migration and green energy.
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‘Ukraine heads for inexorable defeat’
Would that be the same inexorable defeat suffered by all nationalist movements that command a majority of 92% across all regions of their country?
Anyone who believes that nationalist movements can be defeated by force of arms either has no grasp of the history of the human race or is, quite simply, as thick as mince.
No idea mate, but Ukraine was cooked two years ago. You mistake life support for vigor.
Good luck with that.
You are, of course, entitled to your view….
But it seems an odd one, given that Russia occupies less of Ukraine now than it did in 2022….
And Russia has already used up most of its readily accessible foreign currency reserves, Soviet era equipment.
That’s similar to the British performance in the First World War: It’s claimed that Britain achieved ‘decisive victories’ every year from 1914 – 1918, when Germany had burnt through most of its manpower reserves and a Bolshevist uprising in Germany enabled British soldiers to stop winning the war again next year.
It’s rarely mentioned that Britain had an immense superiority in artillery, ammunition and infantry, that its enemies had to fight under similiarly unfavourable circumstances on four other fronts and that this ‘decisive’ victories usually resulted in turning a few villages into white powder by constant shelling and the death of a few hundredthousand infantrymen on both sides.
That food was strictly rationed on the side of the central powers, the civil population slowly (or not so slowy in case of the Ottoman Empire whose rulers cared little for ordinary people) starving to death while soldiers were generally fed just enough to keep them alive due to the British trade blockade which ignored any prior international agreements about scope and form of sea warfare and treatment of neutral states is usually not mentioned at all.
Britain had naval supremacy and broke German civilian morale via blockade resulting in rebellion and the abolition of Germany’s monarchy. Britain and France had air superiority. Britain designed and manufactured the first tanks. A succession of defeats, Hamel, Amiens etc in 1918 inflicted on Germany by the successful coordination of armour, artillery and air power resulted in complete military victory for the allies; the abdication of the Kaiser.
That took four years. The Ukraine conflict has already lasted eleven years, neither side has air superiority or the ability to successfully conduct combined arms operations, so not much similarity at all except in the sheer scale of casualties.
About the only thing that’s true about that is that Britain ruthlessly sought to starve the civil populations of its enemies to death against all established rules of warfare. And just like the British war against civilians in the second world war, this accomplished exactly nothing but dead civilians. The first combined surprise attack of tanks, infantry and aircraft was Cambrai 1917. It ended in a British defeat because of the first German offensive on the western front since Verdun 1916. 1918 saw a series of tactically highly successful but operationally inconclusive German offensives which depleted the remaining German manpower reserves most of which had already been used up until 1916 (Between summer 1914 and summer 1916, the Germany army had needed 4,270,000 replacement soldiers. Only a further 2,170,00 were available until the end of the war¹). Being aware that the war could no longer be won by military force, the German OHL pressed for peace negotations. On the allied side, the British butcher, Douglas Haig, was effectively removed from command in favour of a unified supreme comand under the French general Foch. From September 1918 – November 1918, Entente troops fought a series rearguard actions against the retreating German… Read more »
Ludendorff tried hard in exculpation but failed.
The Kaiser abdicated:
https://net.lib.byu.edu/~rdh7/wwi/1918/willyabd.html.bak
‘September 9 1918, Spa–It was clear to many that Ludendorff’s nerves were increasingly incapable of handling the stress of the situation. In addition to his refusal to accept Germany’s likely defeat, he was prone to fits of temper, crying spells, periods of drunkenness, and extreme micromanagement of his armies. Around this time, Hindenburg summoned a personal friend, Dr. Hochheimer, to speak with Ludendorff.’
I’d not shout too loudly about the “British war against civilians” in WW2. The German nation is in absolutely no position to preach about ethical warfare. I’ll not elaborate further, but I’m sure my meaning is crystal clear.
That’s odd because 17% of the population is ethnic Russian.
“Anyone who believes that nationalist movements can be defeated by force of arms… “
Er: National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy 1945, Imperial Japan 1946… defeated by force of arms.
Or is that not the history you meant?
A short term view; a rather brief period of time concerning certain, political rather than nationalist, movements. The history of the Germanic tribes extends far back into the time of the Roman Europe and before. In the longer view, German nationalism has once more united the country in prosperity. Japan is one of the world’s foremost economies. And Italy deposed, assassinated, its Fascist leader to restore a democracy with historic roots in the Senate and Consuls of the Roman republic.
“Germany’s – and by extension, Western Europe’s – long descent began under Merkel’s dual obsessions: shutting down nuclear and coal power in favour of windmills and solar panels and opening the borders to mass migration from the Middle East and North Africa.”
That certainly contributed to the decline but I think the UK’s decline started much earlier.
Except we’ve out grown Germany,France, Spain and Italy since 2010, by a distance. What has dragged us down is our EU legacy, and the traitors within the civil service.
Do you know what the per capita GDP of UK was in 2010 and what is it now? What are the equivalent figures for Germany? A quick internet search suggests the figures are similar both in absolute terms and in terms of growth. I don’t doubt that the EU may have been a negative influence, but our general decline IMO started much earlier. Probably around WW1, then with post WW2 socialism and mass immigration. The decline has also been cultural.
In addition to ‘Merkel’s dual obsessions’ she was hostile to supporting the Minsk Agreements.
Just think, a neutral Ukraine could have been as successful as Austria has become, with more than a few lives spared, let alone the financial cost.
The money could have been spent on more Wind and Solar farms! 🙂
Austria was reduced from an empire into a residual ethnic state post WW1. It took them a couple of decades and another world war to figure out that neutrality and industry was what they were best at rather than fighting. Ukraine still has this journey ahead of it, both in terms of shedding territories it has no right to and in terms of understanding it needs to win the peace rather than the war. The Ukraine of today is still very far from that. Let’s hope they manage to do it with less bloodshed than Austria.
Same thing though, under Thatcher if not before there was a policy of unqualified third world immigration parallel to a policy of deindustrialization. In Thatcher’s case, the logic was that we don’t need industry because we can make enough money with financial services. But the end result is the same. Those who refuse to understand history are domed to repeat it.
Not for nothing was PhD nuclear physicist Frau Dr Merkel educated at East Germany’s Karl Marx University in Leipzig.
Great summary of the UK & Europe,s predicament .
It not as though there is nobody to commit to and manage sensible Energy policies.
The problem is that those capable, right thinking professionals have been ostracised by the political bubble and kept from the levers of power.
Talking of kings, there are these “no kings” protests in the USA which seem to be about people who don’t like Trump being pissed off that he has been efficient and effective in implementing the policies he was elected on, especially in using his legitimate powers to appoint judges who are not going to block him, just like the Democrats did.
The BBC radio and website news managed to mention those protests but not the digital ID protest in London (which has not received much attention from DS). I have complained.
David Starkey recently commented, in constitutional admiration I think, that the US rejected the British Crown, yet created an elected monarch of their own, given the powers that the president is given.
So has Starkey’s video on this subject inspired these ‘no kings’ protests?
I’m not sure these people are that educated. Perhaps whoever invented the slogan thought of that, but hard to believe they all get the reference. I’m not aware of the context of what Starkey said but it seems a stretch. It’s a similar role but with more limited powers and it’s not a lifetime appointment.
I always though Starkey was a friend of constitutional monarchy, at least as a concept, even if critical of the incumbent monarch.
Brilliant piece. Should serve as a guide as to which MSM to trust, about anything, if they fail to reflect the truths contained in it.
To refurbish an old joke:
Q. How many philosopher queens does it take to replace a light bulb?
A. None; they form a support group titled ‘Living with darkness’.
It is UN and WEF policy to destroy European manufacturing and transfer wealth to Asia and Africa.
The Philosopher Queens and their male counterparts, including the traitors who infest the British Establishment, are simply implementing the Globalists’ policy to destroy the West.
Without even realising that the people who run the world will bury them too when they have served their purpose. Great article. I would change ‘populist right’ to democratically elected right wing parties, though.
Ursula v. d. Leyen is the head of an office in Brussels were a bunch of pencil pushers who have been ‘sorted’ out of actual politics by their respective parties because of dismal performance work on producing paperwork for propoosed EU legislation. And that’s, minus special purpose arrangements like Corona vaccine deal, all.
Chapeau Dr Doshi: excellent even if depressing review.
“Their vision — green utopia, open borders, perpetual warmongering — has produced instead economic decay, social fragmentation and geopolitical irrelevance.” EU aka Fourth Reich, in a nutshell.
And speaking of nuts, we still have bunches of them who insist we should never have left, and want to throw the UK back into this debauched enterprise.
Great article.
Tilak Doshi’s masterclass. What can one add to this, except that is shames all the presstitutes in our mainstream media, especially the armchair warmongers with their collapsing crusade against Russia.
It also underlines the importance of publicising the existence of dailysceptic.org to the ignorant and brainwashed wider public. Yesterday I distributed more of my wake-up business cards in Sainsbury’s car park, pointing people here and to TCW.
Not boasting, just pointing out the yawning chasm between this masterclass of Truth, and the brainwashed ignorance of the average person, which we must overcome.
Good luck with that.
‘Our meta-estimate suggests that, from the beginning of the full-scale invasion to January of this year, Russian casualties amounted to 640,000–877,000 soldiers, of whom 137,000–228,000 have died.
By October 13th, those totals had risen by almost 60%, to 984,000–1,438,000 casualties, including 190,000–480,000 dead.
Russia’s losses have not won a commensurate gain in territory. Since the battle lines stabilised after Ukraine’s first counteroffensive ended in October 2022, they have barely moved. No large city has changed hands.
At the pace of the past 30 days, seizing what remains of the four regions Mr Putin already claims—Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhia—would take until June 2030. (For Russia to occupy all of Ukraine would require a further 103 years.).’
https://www.economist.com/interactive/europe/2025/10/17/russia-latest-big-ukraine-offensive-gains-next-to-nothing-again
Given the Minsk Agreements, that Putin agreed to, they didn’t want to conquer Ukraine: they didn’t want NATO there. And we know Russia focuses on anhialating the enemy’s military, not taking territory, so your figures, while important to Russia, are not as significant to the West as they might be.
The consequence of the West escalating the Maiden Coup in 2014, along with sponsoring wokeness, has been the demise of Europe: not just their military, but their wealth creating industries and confidence in the future.
And still the rulers appear oblivious.
It is the U.S. that has been degrading the Russian military. They are not shy about it. They announced that aim as their strategy….and it has been an outstanding success.
Russia’s war aim is simple demographic imperialist expansionism. Putin could not care less about NATO, believes Article 5 to be a bit of a joke.
Europe has a simple problem, energy costs..and for that the solution is straightforward. So net zero is toast…but democracy takes a while to reflect the will of the majority.
Putin is also finished. He just hasn’t realised it yet
Such was the ‘esteem’ with which the German members of the EU Parliament held Usually Fond Of Lying that most them refused to back her for her first term.
Excellent!