Sei mutig! Be brave!
The slogan did not appear on an AfD poster, but on the front page of Die Zeit, the most respected German weekly newspaper.
Maximilian Probst speaks about the “post-heroic society," an expression coined by scholar Herfried Münkler:
“Low demographic reproduction rates mean that parents invest a great deal of emotional capital in each individual child and that no one is prepared to take risks. We succumb to self-delusion." Probst outlines a utopia “made up of jobs and hobbies interrupted only by the minimal effort of going to the polling station."
Now, Probst warns, “dark stains have spread across this uplifting watercolor: post-heroic society is not sustainable."
One need only observe the saga of the most important and only lethal aircraft carrier we have, which I could have used for my new book “Titanic Europa".
The Charles de Gaulle is the only nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in all of Western Europe. No other country has anything similar, not even the British. The other European countries are not even in the game, and Sánchez’s Spain, the traitor in chief, will buy weapons even from Erdoğan’s Turkey.
On March 1, Emmanuel Macron announced the deployment of the Charles de Gaulle to the Gulf after Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz. After all, the moderate Arab countries targeted by Tehran have done a lot of business with France, and friends should be helped when they are under attack, right?
On March 11, Macron boarded the Charles de Gaulle and launched into one of his uplifting speeches:
“France is present to protect its citizens, to stand by allies and friends who have been struck, and to be able to participate in such essential missions."
Two months later, the Charles de Gaulle still has to cross the Suez Canal. Did it stop in Sharm el-Sheikh for a weekend?
Then Iran threatened Paris:
“Immediate response with ships at Hormuz."
Macron’s retreat was not long in coming: France had “never considered" a “deployment" of forces to Hormuz, but rather a security mission “coordinated with Iran."
“Coordinated with Tehran"? The same Macron who likes to say that “to be free one must be strong, and to be strong one must be feared"?
If it were not tragic, it would be laughable.
I still remember a Wall Street Journal article from January 8, 2015, the day after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris:
“When France sends its nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle through the Persian Gulf in the coming weeks, it will be a demonstration of force against the Islamic State and its aspirations for a caliphate extending from the Middle East to the Atlantic Ocean."
“A demonstration of force"?
Ten months later came the Bataclan massacre in Paris. Apparently none of ISIS felt intimidated by the Charles de Gaulle.
Let us return to the Journal:
“There is no doubt about the name of the enemy, while the French army is also fighting the African manifestations of the same Islamic fundamentalism in Mali and Niger. President François Hollande addressed the nation after the Islamist fundamentalist attack against Charlie Hebdo, a newspaper that often satirized Islam, which caused 12 deaths and shook the country, but the president avoided confronting the harsh reality. Instead, he described the newspaper as having long been targeted by ‘obscurantism.’ Obscurantism?"
The ridiculous odyssey of the Charles de Gaulle is emblematic of Europe’s impotence even in naming the enemy.
The most powerful nuclear ship in Europe reduced to a pleasure boat for a power that still believes itself to be one.
Just like the saga of the British flagship aircraft carrier, the HMS Queen Elizabeth. It was supposed to lead a NATO exercise off the Norwegian coast to demonstrate the power of London’s military. Its driveshaft broke.
The British historian David Olusoga explains in The Telegraph:
“The British army numbered four and a half million men at the end of the First World War, a generation of men familiar with the Lee-Enfield rifle, who knew how to disassemble it, how to remove the magazine, for whom it was a familiar piece of technology just as an iPhone is today. My generation and my mother’s generation did not have to do that. I am not sure that good fortune will be passed on to our children. The world into which I was born, the world in which we have all lived, it seems, has come to an end."
Europe is a continent transformed into a gigantic retirement residence with intellectual pretensions, stupid twenty-four-hour talk shows, trade union marches, Airbnb on every corner, and armed forces reduced to peacekeeping bodies refurbishing their camouflage uniforms and struggling to find young recruits.
This is contemporary Europe: capable of producing regulations on the diameter of bananas but incapable of producing a will to power. We have replaced courage with “governance," sacrifice with “resilience," virility with “care." The European male has become a hybrid being: half influencer, half therapist, forever genuflecting before the newest idol-whether climate, gender, multiculturalism, or Gaza-provided no one asks him to fight for something and against someone.
A continent obese with rights and anorexic with duties. A society that cries over a Palestinian terrorist on Instagram but cannot protect borders, allies, and interests.
Twenty years ago America called the French “cheese-eating surrender monkeys." I liked that America that laughed in our faces and put itself on the line, boot after boot.
But in the current twilight of the West, America and Europe are still different, but only in this: they have taken different roads toward the same destination.
What happens if the United States also becomes like Europe, chatterboxes who lose the will to fight and prevail?
Edward Luttwak writes about this in UnHerd in a dramatic article: “America lost the will to fight and I fear the answer is the arrival in the United States of what I have defined as the ‘post-heroic syndrome.’ It is the historically unprecedented but now widespread refusal to accept the risk of casualties, even very few, even when justified by the most important interests".
I have always thought Donald Trump was the United States’ last attempt to still matter before sinking into the quicksand of Obamaism, which I increasingly see as the most realistic scenario after the exit of the orange anarchist.
Surely connected to this is the fact that Americans today no longer think their country has anything special, no mission or task to fulfill; on the contrary, they think the West is damned, far from being an “indispensable nation."
There is also what Foreign Affairs calls the “geriatric peace," which Luttwak connects to.
Median age rises, young people become scarce, budgets are emptied by pensions and healthcare, collective will evaporates, public squares fill with idiots invoking “peace" while draped in terrorist insignia.
In 2038, the French will commission a new aircraft carrier. It will be called “France Libre". For what purpose?
To ferry flotilla activists on excursions to Gaza?
Beyond military gadgets and naval aviation equipment, the new ship will include a mosque capable of hosting up to one thousand worshippers. The cafeteria will be halal. Female soldiers will wear the abaya.
If it were not tragic, the joke would sound plausible.
There is only one Western people that still resists: the Israeli Jews. Something older, harsher, more alive.
While Europe closed its bases to the war against Iran, Israel was building a clandestine base in the Iraqi desert and sending Mossad agents to guarantee security at the Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna, where two years ago Islamist terrorists were about to carry out a massacre at a Taylor Swift concert.
Neither Mars nor Venus, but “one who struggles with God." In other words, Israel.
A great name, isn’t it?
Giulio Meotti is an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, and writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author, in English, of the book "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter and of "J'Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel" published by Mantua Books, in addition to books in Italian. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Gatestone, Frontpage and Commentary.