VDH's Private Papers::Euromania, Thoughts from Europe

June 10, 2008
Euromania?
Some Thoughts from Ground Zero
by Victor Davis Hanson
Pajamas Media

It’s a Euro Thing

If one were to collate European criticisms of Americana and then compare them to reality in Europe, well, sure confusion results. Here are some thoughts about another visit these last two weeks in Europe.

1. We Americans, we are told, are violators of freedom and have shredded our Western heritage through Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, and detentions.

But if one were to assess rationally the degree of privacy and freedom in Europe, by any fair margin it proves far more the police state. There are far more municipal surveillance video cameras. On the highway flashes go off, as computerized cameras snap pictures of speeding motorists who set off their sensors. Bus drivers must find ingenious ways to hide their hours logged driving, as they insert their computerized cards into their ignition to start their motors. All this seems unimaginable in the U.S.

2. Grasping Americans? The last few weeks I have stayed at some top hotels in the U.S. while speaking. Internet service was usually around $10 to log in on Wifi. The pool and gym were of course gratis.

In Europe? Hotel internet service can run about 20-30 euros for a mere day. There are additional fees to use the gym or pool at most hotels. Read your bill carefully at restaurants; most require some “correction” as the waiters inadvertently add things not ordered. In short, money and its acquisition seem on the brains of almost everyone you meet.

3. Health conscious Europeans? In France and Luxembourg this week, I tried to count the obese among an average of every 10 or so on the street. The result? Americans seem no fatter than Europeans.

Smoking? I don’t know the statistics, but each time I come over here I notice immediately that it is far more common and socially acceptable. As far as the incidence of meat consumption, and the size of servings, I sense no difference, only that food costs about double what it is in the states.

4. Repugnant American culture? The television has nothing much but dubbed American old movies and current television series. Fashion, music, and popular culture are usually American derived. America may run a massive trade deficit with Europe, but American trade names are everywhere.

5. American decline? The French and German newspapers are full of scare stories about their own fuel costs, price-fixing and the loss of national treasure. Scandals involving mortgages and bank collapse are common. In other words, Europeans share the same anxieties about finance and energy as we do — despite having much of the oil and banking industries nationalized or at least carefully state monitored.

The Cauldron of Europe

The region along the French-German border is beautiful, rich and understandably disputed for over 2,000 years. We Americans have a long history with it as well. My mother’s cousin Holt Cather is buried at the American cemetery at Hamm. Not far away at the Meuse-Argonne battlefield, my paternal grandfather was gassed in the First World War. My late cousin Dick Davis came through Luxembourg with the 3rd Army. And so it goes for most Americans, whose ancestors came here under much different circumstances than we do today.

We rightfully give the European Union credit for stopping the historic bloodletting for two generations. But two qualifiers. First, it was birthed because of the American-led destruction of fascism; and preserved only by the American-led resistance to the Red Army.

Second, the price for peace has been a sort of Lotus-eater society of long lunches, obsession with fashion and “nice things”, and secular worship of the god Leisure. In their abhorrence at the old catalysts of strife — nationalism, patriotism, religion — the Europeans have failed to see that national defense, religious belief, and pride in culture need not lead to endless war, but in fact to a healthy society that is content not to expect heaven on earth.

If the E.U. needs the U.S., and we become another E.U., then where’s our U.S.?

Today the French here are striking over threats to raise the retirement age back up to 62, and to reconsider the 35-hour work week. Lost in the discussion is any notion that there is not a “they” out there to shake more money from — only themselves. Europe, for all its socialism and egalitarianism, seems a sort of lottery society, in which each union, each age cohort, each E.U. collective recipient, in a game of musical chairs, tries to outwit the other — the pie finite, its pieces endlessly re-sliced.

I have admiration for the European Union’s unmistakable achievement in avoiding war for half a century, and its widespread prosperity — but it has come at a price. Given what Barack Obama has said about raising taxes, funding new entitlements, yielding to international consensus abroad, and seeing Americans in terms of various racial, class, and tribal constituencies, all with justified grievances, I think his notion of our future is what we see in European today — even as the Europeans grow increasingly restless about unions, high taxes, and their impotence in the world abroad. Apparently even two-hour lunches, no children, no church, no military, good food and the disco can get boring.

A note on Obama: in minute one, Euros gush; in minute two, the questions come; in minute three, they express concern (if they think you too might as well and so can be candid); in minute four, you sense they understand there is only one E.U. So should the U.S. become one too, they worry about who might play the U.S. to the U.S.?

In a sick way this speaks well of Obama: by his intent to turn the U.S. into something like the E.U., he is scaring some elites in the E.U. as never before. There can only be one socialist union: it requires a capitalist wide-open trading partner and a NATO-like ally to offer it free defense as well as an easy target for cheap invective. So the Europeans hint: “Please, don’t become quite like us — we need you as you are.”

Memorial Day in Europe: A Memorial Day Speech?

I was listening from Brussels to Barack Obama’s Memorial Day commencement address. It was, as usual, well-delivered, and broadcast worldwide, but instead of any — even slight — reference to what we owe hundreds of thousands of Americans this day who paid the ultimate sacrifice to ensure our present freedoms, we hear remonstrations about the “money culture” and how young students are not to pursue the big money and house (as he has lately), but instead pursue a path of public service that, as usual, is analogous to that once followed by the noble Mr. Obama himself.

Then I heard a bit of news from another speech of his on Latin America:

“Since the Bush Administration launched a misguided war in Iraq, its policy in the Americas has been negligent toward our friends, ineffective with our adversaries, disinterested in the challenges that matter in peoples’ lives, and incapable of advancing our interests in the region.
No wonder, then, that demagogues like Hugo Chavez have stepped into this vacuum.”

But all that hardly seems either accurate or fair: (1) The “misguided” war was “launched” only after a majority ratification vote of the U.S. Senate, including a majority of the Democratic Senators. (2) The current administration is currently desperately trying to craft a free-trade agreement with Columbia, and ensure that Nafta continues with Mexico-over protectionist sentiment of the sort voiced by Obama. (3) Hugo Chavez came on the scene well before the Bush administration, taking office in 1999 and then being reelected in 2000. His shredding of Venezuela’s constitution and interference in Latin American politics were well under way during the last years of the Clinton administration.

Is it going to be this way each day of the campaign: We get some pious sermon relating the selflessness of his own past to shame us into being similarly idealistic, followed by a complete Orwellian rewrite of history? If so, it’s going to be a long five months.

I spent two days visiting the American military cemetery at the Meuse-Argonne that commemorates the horrific battle of that name in 1918 (my grandfather Frank Hanson was gassed and severely wounded in the battle), and the next day at Hamm, in Luxembourg, where George S. Patton is buried. Both are beautiful, solemn places, and the care and attention given to their upkeep should make all Americans proud. The evidence of Memorial Day French and English flowers and wreaths was remarkable.

Friendly Europeans

At Bastogne, I heard a fiery pro-American rant from a Dutchman, contrasting not just the WWII treatment of his country by the United States versus that from Germany, but the present-day treatment as well from haughty powerful E.U. members like Germany.

Two notes on Anti-Americanism this trip: one, it seems on the wane; two, it is almost an exclusively urban and elite phenomenon. Everyday Europeans in the countryside are especially warm, and seem tired of knee-jerk anti-Americanism. Most seem more worried about Arab immigrants and German bullying in the E.U.

The Dollar

Another note. Although the season is early, there are almost no Americans to be seen. Gas is €1.60 a liter or over $9 a gallon for gas in Europe. I haven’t seen much of Exxon here, so at least we can be assured that the evil American oil companies are not at the heart of the “price-gouging.” The price fixing here seems instead a combination of Gulf monarchies and E.U. tax collectors. Most hoteliers are happy, but whine nevertheless that fewer Americans are coming, and more Euros are going stateside for the summer.

More European Myths

I try to come over here 2-3 times a year and am always struck by the Al-Gore-type lectures back home to Americans about how far we are behind on the Internet, public Wifi, etc. Two observations. Buying Internet here is about 3 times the cost as in the US. And in every hotel I’ve been at yet, there has been some sort of disruption of service or complete failure. At almost any hotel in the U.S., it takes about 3 minutes to log-in for 24-hour service at about $10; here the same time runs about $25 and is far less reliable.

The high tax, big government, secular, pacifist, and enforced egalitarianism of Europe — which seems the Obaman model — is something we should be very wary of emulating.

Battles, Past and Present

We have had a number of Bushites, who in disillusion about their own careers, or angry that they were becoming scapegoats, wrote memoirs at odds with their former pronouncements. But never have we witnessed someone who made the about-switch so abruptly in a matter of months, going from official megaphone to court Procopius — and so blatantly forcing the reader to choose between “he’s lying now” or “he was lying then,” since his own admissions are antithetical to one another. And when McClellan talks about “my truth,” as opposed to a universal truth, we understand how the Foucauldian/Lacanian postmodernist hocus-pocus filters down to the half-educated and gullible like McClellan.

Ultimately, the President would have been far better off not to have selected so many on the basis of “loyalty” rather than competence, since he got neither loyalty nor merit, and missed the eternal truth that the incompetent (McClellan was the worst press secretary of either party since Ron Ziegler) are ultimately the most disloyal.

All we need now is the ex-felon John Dean and mastermind of the Watergate cover-up, as the voice of conscious, to comment on the McClellan case.

Europe

I was recently in Cabourg lecturing and visiting the Normandy battlefields and monuments. The weather was stormy and rainy as it was in 1944, and very little seems to have changed in the surrounding communities.

Driving through the dense hedgerows gives instant understanding to how the Americans could have lost 80,000 casualties while going almost nowhere in the two months after the brilliantly successful landings — but still leaves one perplexed about how such thorough planners at SHAEF could have neglected the effect of the well-known bocage on mobile operations.

This tragedy evokes ‘my brilliant three-week victory over Saddam, your foolish flawed occupation”, albeit the deaths were in the former case in the tens of thousands. Perhaps had only 1/100 the time spent on designing the ingenious Mulberry artificial harbors at Omaha and Gold beaches been invested in equipping Shermans with rhino spikes from the beginning, or training troops in the brush of England rather than the plains, or practicing B-17 bombing runs on enemy formations, then we might have had the breakout in mid-June rather than late July — and therefore reached the Siegfried line a month earlier when the weather was good and the days longer. But then here we go again with baby-boomber third guessing about a prior generation’s heroic decisions.

Footnote on Europe

I went to a beautiful Catholic blessing of the harvest service at the historic cathedral at Rouen. Some observations: the service was quite moving — the Latin mass, the singing, and the tolling of the bells at the end. But there was a touch of sadness as well. There were not more than 5-6 under 60 in the crowd of well over a thousand (maybe a noontime Weekday explains the absence of the young?). In Rouen itself and its environs one sees not very many, if any, new homes; few are pregnant; couples with children are rare, and usually with only one child. Middle-Eastern families are pretty common, always with several offspring. One does not have to be a demographer or an alarmist to see that in 40 years such historic services might well be rare — and a great deal of what had always been the West, in the cultural sense, could be lost.