Kaja Kallas\u2019 striking ignorance \u2013 or willful revisionism \u2013 is precisely why no one is taking the bloc seriously anymore<\/p>\n
Oops. Kaja Kallas, the de facto EU foreign minister already notorious for her chirpy incompetence, has done it again: displayed such elementary ignorance that you have to rub your eyes and double-check before you believe it\u2019s true. But \u2013 as always with her \u2013 it is. This time, she has informed the world that Russia has not been attacked by anyone for a hundred years.
\nThose Nazi generals who planned Operation Barbarossa \u2013 the 1941 attack on the Soviet Union (and thus very much Russia) that left 27 million Soviet citizens dead \u2013 are probably spinning in their graves. Yes, blinded by prejudice and ideology (\u201cvalues\u201d) they badly underestimated the Russians (sounds familiar?) and lost (catastrophically). But having your whole 3-million-men-150-division operation wiped out Orwell-style?
\nAnd what about the many other Europeans who joined the Nazis, either from the beginning or later, with official contingents or as volunteers? The Romanians, Finns, Italians, Spanish, Croatians, Belgians, French, Norwegians, Slovaks, Bulgarians, Hungarians, and, last but not least, Balts, such as from Kallas\u2019s native Estonia?
\nAnd let\u2019s not even start about those prickly Japanese! They, too, got a drubbing at the 1939 Nomonhan\/Khalkhin Gol clash (and yes, it took place on the edge of Mongolia, a Soviet client state), but, again, pretending they never even tried?
\nBeing historically illiterate to such an extent seems almost pitiable. Where geometry has made former German Foreign Minister Annalena \u201c360 degrees\u201d Baerbock intellectually immortal, it is history where Kallas reaches peak benightedness.
\nThat is especially disturbing because failing so badly, in particular in the history of last century\u2019s great wars, makes Kallas a very dangerous person. The reason is as simple as 1,2,3: Together, the last two World Wars \u2013 both caused by Europeans \u2013 cost up to over 81 million lives. We know that a third one would be even worse, whether fought \u201conly\u201d with very advanced and destructive conventional weapons (including AI, of course) or, as is more likely, escalating to the use of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical, biological, and cyber). A Third World War is likely to literally be our last, either forever or for the exceedingly long time it would take the survivors to make their way back from their caves to civilizations sophisticated enough to blow each other up again.<\/p>\n
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Polish MPs reject push to outlaw glorification of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators<\/p>\n
The Ukraine war \u2013 in reality, a Western proxy war against Russia and the emerging multipolar order, executed through misled, betrayed, sold-out, and now almost used-up Ukraine \u2013 has had the real potential to turn into World War Three. This risk has diminished with the second Trump administration, but it will only be gone once the war ends.
\nThe NATO-EU Europeans, meanwhile, are doing their best to keep this war, its destruction, and its apocalyptic escalation potential going: they provide ever more weapons, cannot stop looking for sleazy ways to steal frozen Russian assets and fleece their own tax payers, urge for more Ukrainians to be thrown into the futile meatgrinder, and, last but not least, embolden the Zelensky regime to continue, no matter how much of its ubiquitous corruption is exposed.
\nThe Atlanticists, i.e., deranged European \u201celites\u201d that are staying this insane course, are hard to understand, since they do not follow reason, as their suicidal and yet persistent sanctions policy proves; their ethics are also utterly perverse, as their equally persistent complicity in Israel\u2019s ongoing Gaza genocide illustrates.
\nYet we can observe facets of their madness. One is that, clearly, to work so obstinately toward World War Three requires never having understood World War Two. That\u2019s the one that ended with the first and only use in wartime of the kind of weapon that may well play a main role in a world-ending World War Three, too: When the US deliberately and entirely without military necessity massacred the populations of the two large Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it did not simply end a war by an enormous, shameful, and never acknowledged crime. It also opened the door to a future we all must pray will never arrive.
\nRegarding World War Two, EU de facto foreign minister Kallas, as so often, embodies NATO-EU European group-non-think as few others, revealing carelessly what slightly less ham-fisted operators still try to conceal.
\nCurrently, she is doing her very worst to prevent peace from breaking out. While many leaders of NATO-EU Europe display what the Germans now call \u201cFriedensangst\u201d (the fear of peace), Kallas is second-to-none in her denial of reality, Russophobia, and, last but not least, bizarre over-estimation of the EU\u2019s and her own personal influence. Demanding a place in negotiations\u00a0the EU has deliberately stonewalled and calling for \u201cconcessions\u201d from Russia as if the West and Ukraine were winning the war, Kallas has been publicly snubbed by the US.<\/p>\n
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Human blood swastikas found all over German town \u2013 police<\/p>\n
Yet there is a method to her madness. Kallas\u2019s inability to adequately process the present reflects her unusually pronounced inability to learn from the past. Only recently, speaking at a conference on security studies, she shared her dumb surprise at the fact that Russia and China believe they are among the victors of World War Two. Ironically, for Kallas, this is a dangerous \u201cnarrative,\u201d clearly factually false in her eyes, and only successful with those who read little and don\u2019t remember history all that well. She has felt \u201cmany question marks\u201d in her head, she has informed us. If only she could grasp why.
\nIn reality, both Russia and China played key roles in defeating the global fascist offensive that was at the core of World War Two. This is not the place for details \u2013 Kallas should feel strongly invited to finally read up on them (if she can) \u2013 but a few key facts will be enough: In Asia, World War Two started even earlier than in Europe, with Japanese aggression against China; the war also lasted longer.
\nKallas is displaying a narrow-minded provincialism and a lousy education by reducing the struggle to that, as she put it, against the \u201cNazis.\u201d That was the main story in Europe, but not in Asia, where the fight against Japanese fascism cost China an estimated 35 million lives. Kallas\u2019s English is infamously rudimentary. She may want to try to improve it by making her way through, at least, historian Rana Mitter\u2019s \u2018Forgotten Ally: China\u2019s World War II, 1937-1945\u2019.\u00a0I am not sure she has ever read a whole book. If not, this would be a good first time. If she has, a second one is clearly required. And, for once, not some neo-Noltean tract by American history mangler and Ukraine War booster Tim Snyder.
\nThe Soviet Union, with Russia at its core, suffered 27 million deaths. And without its staggering sacrifice and equally stunning efforts, Nazi Germany would not have been defeated: the preponderant share of its military forces were destroyed by Soviet soldiers on what the Germans called the Eastern Front. If they had not been ground down there, only two outcomes would have been possible: a Nazi empire would have survived or the US would have dropped atomic bombs on Germany as well.
\nGermans especially, among whom hating as well as underestimating Russia is all too fashionable again, would do well to remember a simple, little understood fact: it is precisely the Soviet victory over Germany by conventional arms that spared them a continuation of Nazi rule (though many may, of course, have welcomed that) or the fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
\nKallas, in any case, is not one for learning. Clearly combining the worst of bigoted eastern European nationalism and Brussels\u2019s simple-minded hubris, she can\u2019t even sense when she has made a fool of herself. How do we know? Because when challenged, she made things worse again.<\/p>\n
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In case you still doubt Ukraine\u2019s neo-Nazi problem<\/p>\n
Kallas produced her display of incompetence and condescension on the occasion of China\u2019s 80th victory celebrations. Unsurprisingly, its representatives have been clear. Beijing Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun condemned Kallas\u2019s inanities as \u201cfull of ideological bias,\u201d\u00a0\u201cwithout historical common sense,\u201d displaying \u201cdisrespect,\u201d and, last but not least, \u201charm[ing] the EU\u2019s own interests.\u201d The latter, of course, has never stopped Estonia\u2019s most embarrassing export.
\nGerman EU parliamentarian Fabio de Masi, now co-leader of the New-Left BSW party, requested a clarification. In her response, Kallas managed to dig her hole even deeper: She claimed \u2013 untruthfully \u2013 that \u201con the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Asia, the EU paid tribute also to the courage of the people of China, who endured immense suffering in defending their homeland and contributing to the end of the war.\u201d In reality, she \u2013 and therefore the EU \u2013 had just done exactly the opposite: insulted China by explicitly denying its contribution. Kallas\u2019s official job title is, in case she cannot remember, \u201cVice-President of the Commission\/High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.\u201d\u00a0She speaks and mis-speaks for the EU, even if that is a catastrophe that should never have happened.
\nRegarding Russia, Kallas did not even make the effort to pretend. Instead, she simply continued her silly attempt to deny its key contribution to defeating Nazism. Accusing Russia of \u201cmanipulating\u201d history, she felt this was also the right occasion to also once again repeat the absurdity that the West did not provoke the war in Ukraine.
\nClearly, Kallas\u2019s latest sally is shocking but not a surprise. It fits perfectly with her personal record of blithely chattering about breaking up Russia. It also fits with a widespread mood among NATO-EU Europe\u2019s \u201celites,\u201d where disparaging Russia and Russians is as much de rigueur as a stupid romanticization of Ukraine, its far right, and nationalism. Where Kallas can hold high office, normality is anything but.
\nThe real question is when this nightmare of ignorance, war hysteria, and arrogance will finally end in Europe. Because if it does not, Europeans will only have themselves \u2013 or, to be precise, their \u201celites\u201d \u2013 to blame when most of the world will write them off not only as the people who helped Israel commit genocide in Gaza but also as simply very unserious: yesterday\u2019s privileged, now economic lightweights led by political lightweights who are too lazy to notice how silly they look.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kaja Kallas\u2019 striking ignorance \u2013 or willful revisionism \u2013 is precisely why no one is taking the bloc seriously anymore Oops. Kaja Kallas, the de facto EU foreign minister already…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23547,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economy","category-environment","category-politics"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t