Mr. Gorbachev, Rebuild This Wall!

In a June, 1987 speech President Ronald Reagan famously said “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”.

In November of 1989 the wall did come crumbling down and Eastern Europe, trapped under the yoke of communism for nearly half a century, joined the free world.

As an American looking at Europe from afar, it always seemed to me that the Western Europeans treated the newly liberated Eastern Europeans as country bumpkins, backwards cousins to be humored but never really considered as equals. This seemed incredibly arrogant to me as the only reason the Soviets stopped where they did was the presence of the U.S. armed forces, otherwise the Red Army would have kept on raping their way across Europe until they hit the Atlantic Ocean.

That was 37 years ago.

During those three and a half decades since, Eastern Europe for the most part has been modernizing and casting off the decades of stagnation under Soviet tyranny. Poland is leading the way with a GDP of 1.133 trillion with a per capita GDP of $31,186. According to Wikipedia…

Poland has seen the largest increase in GDP per capita (more than 100%) both among the former Eastern Bloc countries, and compared to the EU-15 (around 45%). It has had uninterrupted economic growth since 1992, even after the 2008 financial crisis.

Pretty impressive in a nation of just over 37 million people.

Even with Poland growing quickly, the former Warsaw Pact nations in general lag behind the Western European nations that for the most part thrived after World War II. Western Europe became famous for having generous social welfare states, “free” healthcare and so on.

Then something odd happened. Western Europe apparently decided to commit collective societal seppuku. They stopped having children and they started to invite the third world to come live among them with the promise of free stuff. Ostensibly these new immigrants would fill in the low level service jobs that Europeans were too advanced to work in but in reality what happened is that these immigrants showed up, went on the public dole and then became a major and dangerous nuisance.

The thing about a generous social welfare state, it can sort of work in a society with plenty of contributors relative to recipients and where the population is mostly homogeneous. What seems to invariably happen is that the number of takers outnumbers the givers and different racial and ethnic groups begin to compete with each other over the dwindling pool of resources.

In the case of Western Europe this mixture is skewing more and more towards the takers and even mild “austerity” measures are seen as draconian and unjust, and of course often as “racist”.

That brings me to France.

The standard media line is that these are “student protests” justifiably complaining about the lack of funding for French schools, which makes burning those schools down perfectly reasonable I guess. These “French students” just want a good education and good jobs! Then you see the videos and mostly what is on display are adult male Africans of various sorts burning and looting, because that is what Africans love to do, with many of them giving the finger to the camera or making charming gestures like the finger across the throat thing or pantomiming shooting a rifle.

What we get are Africans, incapable of creating much less appreciating beauty, burning down historic buildings that withstood two world wars but could not survive diversity.

These Africans are not alone of course. As is always the case they are aided, abetted and encouraged by far left wannabe Bolsheviks. It isn’t like Africans need any encouragement to loot and burn and kill but their actions provide cover for the ideological posterity of Lenin and Stalin to cause even more chaos.

In the bigger picture what is happening is a giant welfare state is being strained on all sides by a coalition of:

• Older French on the pension system who are mostly interested in protecting their pensions and health care.
• Younger French and non-French residents who want free schooling as well as providing for all living expenses. Many of these are affiliated at least loosely with “antifa” and other far left extremist groups.
• A growing population of non-French residents, mostly from places like the Maghreb meaning Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, that are not at all interested in or capable of assimilation or work and are living in France for the generous welfare benefits.

The population of takers keeps growing while the population of contributors shrinks, and many of these takers from Africa will never contribute a dime to the system they are drawing from. Make no mistake, it is a wildly expensive and generous system as we see as this dumb twit from Switzerland got blown up by the community note…

57% of the GDP of France is “public spending”. By contrast the French spend about 2% of their GDP on their military. This guy makes a further claim…

Look at the U.S. by way on contrast. We think we spend a lot on welfare and other “social spending”, and we do, but our share is under 20% of GDP while France is half again that much (as is Austria which helps explain the massive influx of Africans and Middle Easterners living there).

This is obviously not sustainable. We are already seeing rioting over “austerity” and a ridiculous claim of insufficient funding. When the money really dries up, what will these people do then? A massive population of violent and dumb Africans who have come to expect gibs suddenly being told the gibs aren’t there anymore? Good luck with that conversation.

Back to Eastern Europe. Thanks to coming out of Communist control in the late 80s/early 90s, Eastern Europe has lagged behind the West economically. Where the East has also lagged far behind? Foreign immigrants….

While nations like France (10%), Germany & Austria (12-15%) and Ireland, Spain & Sweden (15$-17%) have large and growing “immigrant” populations the East does not….

That lack of “immigrants” more than economics is why I think Eastern Europe is better poised for long term survival than Western Europe….at least as long as the Eastern Europeans can keep the immigrants out. The ((((Usual Suspects))) are already pushing hard for Poland to import massive numbers of immigrants but the Poles so far have resisted.

What happens if the unrest we have been seeing in France, Italy and elsewhere in Europe increases and spreads? Instability leads to migration and at some point these “human” locust will look to the relatively stable nations of Eastern Europe and decide to try their luck there, having devoured Western Europe until nothing remains.

It might be time for Eastern Europe to reconsider the Berlin Wall and think about rebuilding it, not to keep Eastern Europeans in but to keep the migrants hordes of Western Europe out.