Julius Caesar famously said that Gaul was divided into three
parts, for a territory covering then most of France and Belgium today. Were he
to visit us in our century, Caesar would find that even flyspecks are now
divided into an infinite number of fiefdoms. The fake "capital" of
Europe is one example. It has not one mayor, like Washington DC, Berlin,
Vienna, or The Hague. It has not two, nor ten: it has no less than nineteen
mayors, all complete with "Cabinet Directors", if not even
"Chiefs of Protocol" or "Directors of Foreign Relations".
They all play would-be international statesmen, without any
of the qualities which the job would require. They all "twin" their
decrepit boroughs with exotic places, preferably with sunny beaches, five-stars
hotels and easy flight connections. Nineteen potentates of micro-communes are
thus busy touring the world as if they had anything to say, and as if anyone
would take them seriously. Indeed, in the waiting room of the mayors of Senegal
or Rwanda, one can be sure to meet one of the 19 Brussels' mayors, twiddling
his thumbs, while one of his many compadres vainly tries to be taken seriously
by his African "twin".
While their 19 mayors make themselves pathetic buffoons on
the world stage, the inhabitants of Brussels have plunged far into Dante's
hell. It is today more anarchic than a Brazilian favela, poorer than a
Congolese shantytown, dirtier than a Cairo dump, and more dangerous than the
gangsters' fiefdoms of Ciudad Juarez. Its infrastructure is literally crumbling
down. Nightlife has vanished. Reputed restaurants close their doors one after
the other, letting smelly Turkish, African or Arab fast food joints occupy the
space. It is not a "hellhole", like President Trump recently said: it
is Hell itself.
Not that 19 mayors of the 19 boroughs of Hell come for the
price of one. For their combined salaries only, they siphon off together 2
million euros a year, for a job that the single mayors of The Hague, Vienna or
Berlin do far better, and for a quarter of a million. The manna of 2 million a
year is only for the mayors themselves. Besides their "chiefs of
protocol", they also entertain one thousand counsellors
("échevins"). Naturally, the entire circus needs to be coiffed by a
"parliament", a "government", a "federation", and
a multitude of institutions created for the sole purpose of draining their
victims' wallets. New York, for its 8 million inhabitants, has 150 counsellors.
If the officials of the Big Apple would be as predatory and corrupted as the
ones in Brussels, and if we kept the proportion (Brussels has 1,1 million), the
New Yorkers would have to fork out the salaries and assorted perks of ... eight
thousand counsellors! The municipal meetings could not even be held in the
Radio City Music Hall, too small for the venue!
Theft is not limited to salaries. The Brussels water company
is nothing but a fat cash-cow for the public purse (and for the private purses
of party stalwarts). It needs 100 "directors", all without any
competences in engineering, management, accounting, or even law. By comparison,
Washington Water has 10 directors, all with degrees or experience in matters
closely related with water distribution. Needless to say, Belgian incompetence
and corruption translates into poor service and predatory prices: water can
cost more than three times the Washington price, and Brussels delivers only a
third of the volume of its DC counterpart; for a similar number of connections.
Brussels extortions and contortions are all in the name of a fake
"social" justice: an Arab family of four will pay less than its
single neighbour: the Company has invented "personal quotas" and
"solidarity tariffs".
The problem begins thus with the piling up of
"elected" officials. In reality, in the absurd country that Belgium
has morphed into, "elected" means "co-opted by
party-comrades" to occupy fancy but useless jobs in public or semi-public
outfits, and extract from the public more than what the public can afford. The
beneficiaries do not even attempt to hide their theft. The mayor of
"Brussels-central" gave himself and his paramour salaries bigger than
the one allocated to the President of the United States. For each one of the
pair. And for "managing" an assistance programme to the poor,
invented by them, and duplicating existing institutions in each of the 19
fiefdoms.
Elections do not serve any more purpose than a Venetian
mask: pretty, even showy, but useless, and thrown in the garbage after the
carnival. For the last ten years, the spoils did not go to the winners, but to
the losers. With 589 days (a world record!) without government after elections
in 2010, an agreement was finally concluded by the parties who had ... lost the
largest number of voters.
Elections we have nonetheless. Voting is even ... mandatory.
With a "logical" consequence. "Logical" meaning
"absurd" in Belgian politics, the penalty is... the withdrawal of the
right to vote! Voting is thus not a right, but an obligation, under the penalty
of law and the threat of sanctions. The country has invented what an indigenous
journalist has termed, admirably, and without realizing the absurdity of his
statement: "the mandatory right to vote"!
This sets the scene for the next disaster, extending far
beyond Belgium: the mutation of the entire city into a giant Molenbeek. The
next "communes" contaminated by the pest cultivated in Molenbeek will
be, in all probability, the ones adjacent to the commune. Molenbeek is now
known the world over for the pandemics of Islam (radical or not), huge
unemployment (up to 60% amongst young "Belgians" of foreign origins,
mostly from failed states), dismal educational scores in international
rankings, and crime (organised or not). In reality, Molenbeek has left Belgium
long ago, in the sense that it feels more like Ramallah than Bruges. It
"celebrates" Islamist massacres as victories over the miscreants, and
terrorists as "freedom fighters". Cars are burned in the streets and
shops looted, after each soccer match.
The current mayor has attempted to clean up the chaos left
by her predecessor. She has received the support, and is under the supervision,
of the federal government, a première in a discombobulated country. The
previous mayor, a scheming socialist, had closed both eyes to the deliquescence
while he stayed in power for several mandates. Not only was he looking the
other way for electoral purposes, touring the mosques, courting the imams,
offering useless public jobs to a cohort of Arabs without qualifications or
even the desire to work. Most of the Molenbek terrorists who murdered and
maimed innocent passers-by in Brussels, Paris, and other places, had received
public "support" of one kind or another. "Social" housing,
subsidized utilities, public sinecures in the administration, aid to the
"creation of enterprises". The brother of three of authors of the
Paris slaughters had a job in the "communal" bureaucracy. He later
masterminded a hold-up of the same administration. The parents of that
wonderful family lived in subsidized housing owned by the commune.
The former Molenbeekian mayor had allowed the peril to grow
for lowly pecuniary motives: mayors' salaries are related to the number of
inhabitants. Under that rule, invented by the beneficiaries themselves for
their own profit, Molenbeek grew to become a favela of 100.000 people. After
the world's spotlight revealed the commune as a nest of terrorism, Molenbeek is
now supervised by the "federal" authorities. Under that supervision,
the commune has ejected thousands of illegal residents. Naturally, an
"order to leave the territory" may only mean that the persons
concerned will seek refuges in their communities established in France or
elsewhere. Many were "registering" only to extract from Belgium
various social perks, while living in what all Moslems call "their
country". They soon will reappear, and claim resources in another European
country.
Kicking an anthill does not suffice. The result is even
worse than the situation before the kick. After a wave of "controls"
in Molenbeek, the surrounding communes have seen their Arab population surge
rapidly. With the consequences one could have expected. Replacement of grocery
stores by "halal" franchises, controlled (and taxed) by the imams, is
only one aspect. Shops which still flourished not long ago, but are not part of
the Moslem way of life, have totally disappeared. Not long ago, in my immediate
surroundings, I had access to no less than six newspapers stores. The last one
of the six has closed, after an attack (with an hammer...) of the owner. The
attackers were, according to the language now mandatory, young from milieus
"défavorisés" or "difficult".
Bakeries, clothes' shops, interior decorators, dry cleaners
have all closed, and so have restaurants and flower shops, leaving in their
wake fruit stalls, or decaying buildings and boarded façades. To mask the
misery, public funding (the last cents extorted by the impoverished taxpayers
who have not yet fled) have been lavished on the creation of enterprises by the
new population. Needless to say, bureaucrats choosing the beneficiaries of
their largesse are less attentive to the use of taxpayer's money than to the
exact duration of their union-negotiated coffee pause. In 2011, in Liège, a
decaying socialist slum in eastern Belgium, a lone killer gunned down 7 innocent
passers-by and wounded more than 100 persons on a Christmas market. All that
carnage was made possible by automatic weapons and grenades acquired with
public funds obtained for "enterprise-creation". The terrorist's
other occupation, a quasi professional production of marijuana, was also made
possible by public funding reserved for entrepreneurs from milieus
"défavorisés".
If the money wasted on "enterprise creation"
remains modest, the growing expenses to offer "free" education is far
more substantial. "Communes" surrounding the powder keg of Molenbeek
have been forced to extort ever more money from aging retirees to pay for
frenetically erecting schools in every available corner of their territory.
There are hardly any children of Belgian extraction, culture or language(s) in
these new schools (and in the old ones). The Belgians who are still young
enough to have children have to pay twice. First, to educate Africans in
third-world schools, for which taxes are extorted. And second, to plead with the
last remaining private schools, to have their own children admitted in the few
surviving enclaves of European education.
The pressure wil continue to mount until the Apocalypse.
After shops and schools, the new population uses all means to push existing
residents out of their home. All houses put on the market are bought by Arabs.
But the market (and the exasperating longevity of the true Belgians) does not
respond fast enough to the pressure of invaders. Life-expectancy on one side
collides with fertility on the other. Intimidation, and even force, must
accelerate the "cleaning" process.
After complaining of an Arab child banging for hours on my
wall with a football, his parents did not teach him the civilised manners of
the Occident, but the brutal customs of the uneducated Maghreb. His mother
encouraged him to hit more and more, screamed and yelled that it was her
country as well as mine (a common mantra of newcomers from Africa) and his
father shouted threateningly that he will buy my "barrack", when I
sell it, out of despair and fear.
"Small brooks make great rivers", as the saying
goes. In Flemish, a "brook" is a "beek". Once joined, all
the Molenbeeks in Brussels will make "rivers of blood", to use the
title of a famous - and prescient- 1968 speech by Enoch Powell. In the middle
of the carnage, politicians do not care: as long as they can loot the Belgians,
and delay for another election the day of reckoning, the politicians will
divide the spoils, regardless of voters' opinions and anger.
Before drafting his project of Constitution, James Madison
carefully studied all major constitutional arrangements, in the Antiquity or in
force at the time of his analysis. Amongst all of the fundamental laws he
reviewed, he choose what was then called "The Etats-Belgique" as a
counter-example. The Treaty governing the "Etats-belgique" at that
time was exactly what was to be avoided. And that is why the US Constitution is
still alive today, and Belgium is a failed state. Thomas Jefferson famously
condemned Belgium to failure even before it was invented as an
"Etat-tampon" by the British, who were eager, after Waterloo, to
avoid all further Napoleonic pilfering, murder and destructions. Jefferson
correctly identified the cause of the Belgian failure: he wrote that the
various components of the "Etats-Belgique" will never vote in the
general interest of the whole. In fact, in Belgium, there is no
"whole".
And that is why the country is an interesting testing ground
for a complete renewal, redirecting, and reconstructing of Europe. The
continent has erred far from its single objective of its founding in 1957
("the constant improvement of the living and working conditions of their
peoples"). The comparison with most countries in Asia, South America, and,
of course, the United States, shows the slow decay of these "living and
working" conditions since the turn of the century. And, to hide the
disaster, the officials and politicians have chosen the usual tactics: divert
the attention from their failures. They have imposed an objective totally
absent from the Treaty creating European institutions. They now extend their
mandates not to "their" peoples, but to "all" peoples,
welcoming massively the victims of other failed states. It is far easier to
treat the symptoms (immigration) than to resolve once and for all the causes
(corruption, incompetence, autocracy, etc..) in the countries of origin. Just
as it was easier for the Roman Emperors in the fourth century AD to surrender
to the barbarians, and to allow then into the Empire than to fight the
invaders, or extend the rule of law to the barbarian territories.
Answers found to revert the decay and decomposition of
Europe, and its flooding by uncontrollable and growing waves of migrants may
come too late, and find no proper structures to implement them. Failing an
answer, specks with flimsy historical claims to self-determination will push to
hasten the destruction. Catalonia, Scotland and, of course, the Flanders are
all candidates to give a try at "independence". A bit like Icarus,
trying to fly too high, too close to the sun, just to see his wings melt, and
crash into the sea.
Answers and solutions will not be local, or national, but
collective. Unfortunately, Europe does not rise to the challenge. Perhaps
eurocrats are too busy issuing rules on the curves of bananas or pocketing
fines on monopolies, real and imagined. Or perhaps are they mesmerized by the
tsunami threatening to destroy Europe and its civilization.
Unfortunately, reasons to hope are few. Europe is a cacophony,
compared with the force of persuasion (or the threats) of the United States,
China, or Russia. In a foreign country, the voice of America, through a single
ambassador, or a presidential morning tweet from Washington, will be heard,
loud and clear. The voices of 28 ambassadors, or ministers, or even presidents,
contradicting each other and the bureaucratic Hydra of Brussels, make Europe
totally powerless, ridiculous, and irrelevant.
Europe has always been weak, spineless and even cowardly. In
Jefferson's time, the gang chiefs of what was then known as "The Barbary
coast" (Algeria, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia) had two sources of revenue. The
first was piracy. They captured merchant vessels, demanded ransoms, and, if not
paid, sold crews and passengers as slaves. The second source was the amounts
paid on a regular basis by the weak states of Europe, to obtain
"free" passage, and avoid capture, a sort of "flat ransom".
Jefferson would have none of it. Despite his aversion for "standing
armies", he created the first "Navy", and sent the ships with
the mission to blast the pirates' nests (Tripoli, Algiers, etc) out of
existence. Piracy and extortion ceased.
Where is that courage today? Where is the European
Jefferson? And how long will the Europeans pay the price for the cowardice of
their governments and the paralysis of Europe, in the face of a mortal threat?
