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| Europe |
| Spengler: Writing off Europe |
| 2004-12-06 |
| Every German schoolroom should display a stuffed Dutchman as a horrible example to youth, wrote the poet Heinrich Heine in 1831. For Americans, the horrible example to youth at the taxidermist shop is Western Europe. Last month the US re-elected a president despised by enormous European majorities. Europeans hate and fear the United States, but Americans barely can summon the energy to ignore Europe, which they have written off as a decadent and soon-to-disappear civilization. In the major newspapers of the US east coast, to be sure, Europeans continue to read about their sad little concerns. What "red state" Americans hear, by contrast, is that Europe is dying, like the now-vanished "evil empire" of Soviet communism. I have been viewing a video titled The Siege of Western Civilization (Storm King Press, www.stormkingpress.com, US$19.95) in which a former US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) official, Herbert Meyer, advises Americans on what they may do to avoid Europe's dreadful fate. Meyer's Siege video better reflects America's mood than the international pages of The New York Times. When the administration of president Ronald Reagan determined that Soviet communism could be crushed, not merely contained, I observed recently, CIA director William J Casey "routinely ignored the legions of Russian-studies PhDs, reaching out instead to irregulars who could give him the insights he required" (How America can win the intelligence war, June 15). Herbert Meyer led the irregulars who broke with the established CIA view to argue that the Soviet economy was at the edge of breakdown. |
| Posted by:tipper |