Europe's "Leaders" a Bad Joke

Comparing the 1878 Congress of Berlin to yesterday's gathering before Trump's desk.

Someone just sent me the following photograph of yesterday’s congress of European “leaders” assembled before Trump’s desk.

These “leaders” tagged along with Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. to whom they have, in recent years, become adoring supplicants.

How the former TV actor and protégé of the Ukrainian oligarch, Ihor Kolomoisky — who is persona non grata in the United States —became such a figure of adulation strikes me as one of the greatest mysteries of European history.

It wasn’t so long ago that Ukraine was widely perceived in Europe and North America to be an extremely corrupt country run by gangster oligarchs—a country with an unsavory reputation for collaborating with Nazi Germany during World War II.

I still remember the bad press Ukraine got when the American autoworker, John Demjanjuk, was extradited to Israel in 1986 on charges that he was Ivan the Terrible of the Treblinka extermination camp.

You can therefore imagine my surprise when, in 2023, the Canadian Parliament gave a standing ovation to Yaroslav Hunka—in the presence of President Zelenskyy—for Hunka’s service as a “Ukrainian freedom fighter” against the Soviet Union.

As is this weren’t insane enough —given that the Soviet Union was (officially) our principle ally against Nazi Germany—a little bit of scrutiny revealed that Hunka had served in the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, a Nazi Party military unit.

We’ve come a long way since Austrian President Kurt Waldheim was smeared for merely serving as a German regular army second lieutenant, attached as a liaison (interpreter) staff officer to General Ercole Roncaglia’s Italian army in Montenegro.

During Waldheim’s Austrian presidential campaign in 1986, the New York Times—unwittingly serving as the agent of the Austrian Socialist Party trying to prevent Waldheim (a conservative) from winning the election—published a photograph of Waldheim serving as Roncaglia’s interpreter in a conversation with Waffen SS General Martin Phleps on an airfield in Podgorica.

This image alone was enough to brand the former UN Secretary General a “Nazi.”

Studying the Waldheim Affair gave me my first glimpse of just how much powerful interests and their friends in the media are willing to lie in the pursuit of their objectives, and just how easy it is to manipulate public sentiment. I had lunch with Waldheim not long before his death, and I got the impression he still didn’t entirely understand what exactly had happened to him and why.

As the Canadian Parliament showed us in 2023, yesterday’s villains become today’s heroes if it serves what today’s idiot politicians believe to be their current interests.

Studying the imagery of yesterday’s “Congress of Donald Trump’s Desk” prompted me review the imagery of the 1878 Congress of Berlin, which met to discuss settling the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78.

The Congress was dominated by British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. I wonder what they would have thought of Keir Starmer and Friedrich Merz—the sentimental sock puppets of Davos.

Coincidentally, I received the photograph of the “Congress of Donald Trump’s Desk” right after I got off the phone with an old English friend who has just gone through hell with the British National Health Service

A lawyer and member of the Middle Temple, she comes from an old family that has worked and paid taxes in Britain for centuries. Her treatment at the hands of the NHS strikes me as downright sadistic.

A “distinguished professor” at the Marsden Centre told her he suspected her abdominal lump to be a sarcoma (base exclusively on his viewing of images). After receiving this dreadful news, she was obliged to wait for over two weeks to receive any word about her treatment plan.

In other words, the “distinguished professor” consigned her and her family to a fortnight of sleepless nights based solely on his interpretation of images. Only after she waited for two weeks did the Marsden clinic schedule her for an excisional biopsy in September — almost three months after the tumor was detected.

Realizing that, if it was indeed a sarcoma, it would likely metastasize before the NHS addressed the problem, I urged my friend to find a sarcoma specialist in private practice. She took my advice and was quickly scheduled for a biopsy. As I suspected, the lesion is a desmoid tumor (not malignant) and not a sarcoma.

I mention my friend’s vignette because it strikes me as an expression of the fact that many of England’s institutional leaders don’t give a fig about the English people.

The British government now seems chiefly concerned with its weird “Cult of Volodymyr Zelenskyy” and its strange fetish for importing men from Central Asia.

Disraeli famously made fun of his rival, William Gladstone, for constantly moralizing about international affairs instead of staying focused on British interests. Even though Bismarck regarded Britain as one of Germany’s chief rivals, he greatly admired Disraeli and his realistic approach to international affairs. Commenting on Disraeli’s performance that the Congress of Berlin, Bismarck remarked, “Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann (The old Jew, he is the man)."

It’s time for Starmer, Macron, and Merz to get real, start thinking about their own people, and endeavor to forge a respectful and cooperative relationship with Russia instead of constantly spouting humbug and embarrassing themselves.