I have to say, against the background of the dawdling, impotent, fussy EU, the US is showing up for Ukraine in a way that impresses:
It would have been harder for Russia to keep up the invasion of Ukraine if it didn’t feel a constant tacit support of the EU. There would still be an invasion, of course, but the scope might have been smaller. Western Europe is fading away, in every sense of the world.
France has ceded its place as the intellectual leader of the Western civilization. It has degenerated to open fascism and the worship of the pathetic little Russian neo-Nazi Limonov. Nobody in Europe is in too much of a hurry to take France’s place at the helm. Of course, I’ve been hoping that Spain would finally take back its place as the intellectual and cultural center of the West but I’m not delusional, I know that’s just my silly dream.
The UK has eviscerated its intellectuals on too many levels for them to be able to make any impact on anybody. Germany has been intellectually bankrupt since the time when all of its civilizational advances led the world to the dead-end of Hitlerism. The Scandinavian countries will, surely, awaken one day and stun the world but for now they are descending deeper and deeper into an intellectual slumber. The Netherlands and Belguim are still reeling from their bizarre experiments with “multiculturalism.” Hungary has become a place it is too shameful even to notice. Eastern Europe will need at least 100 more years to get over the legacy of the Soviet domination. And that’s only if Russia lets them do that. Italy and Greece haven’t produced anything for centuries and are now stuck dealing with their bizarre levels of corruption for God knows how long. Canada is too overawed by the US to believe in its own capacity to create anything of value.
For now, I’m not seeing any alternative to the United States becoming the West’s intellectual leader. That will be a curious development. As Russians say, a holy place is never empty. So somebody will be stepping into the void. The question now is: who will that be?
P.S. I’m talking about intellectual and cultural leadership. Intellectual and cultural. Mentioning the Marshall Plan in this context will not be an intelligent thing to do.
Clarissa's Blog 
It’s even more the time for Québec to separate.
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Excuse me why I compose myself from laughing so hard I cried.
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God save the Queen.
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So Ukraine should go back to Russia?
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What do you mean by “go back”? Ukraine was never for a moment part of Russia.
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David, you always crack me up and most of the time I’m not sure if you intend to be funny.
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Replace Russia by “former USSR”.
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You can’t rejoin what doesn’t exist, so the analogy still doesn’t work.
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Why not a new USSR?
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Ouch! http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-28464009
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Is it possible we have gone past the time when it made sense to nominate one country as the intellectual/cultural leader? These days I get books delivered to my door from French and Japanese and Swedish writers. Sometimes I download them onto my e-reader in seconds. On my computer I can listen to music from anywhere in the world. Communication is instantaneous and almost free. Ideas spread from country to country in seconds, not years. Where you live is, in most cases, irrelevant.
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Totally agree with this. By the way, creating rankings of everything is a very american thing, haha. USA # 1 TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT!
“France has ceded its place as the intellectual leader of the Western civilization. It has degenerated to open fascism and the worship of the pathetic little Russian neo-Nazi Limonov.”
I’m wary of making grand pronouncements like these, both positive and negative. Like, here in the USA (which you’ve declared as #1) you have a significant amount of population hating the back president, rampant xenophobia, talking about an armed uprising against FEDERAL TYRANNY, etc. Yet, nobody would say USA has degenerated into fascism.
Also, I’m not sure what your definition of ‘cultural and intellectual leader’ is. Maybe this is from my training in math and science, but at the very least, you should have some objective criteria (articles in top journals, scientific inventions per capita, books published per capita, award-winning movies/plays/tv shows, or whatever else you can think of). If you do that, I suspect you’d find that US has been #1 for quite some time, and not much has changed.
You make it seem like USA has just recently snatched the heavyweight title by a dazzling knockout victory over France, all Rocky-like, by simply taking a tough stand on Putin.
And if we’re counting foreign policy decisions in towards evaluating the intellectual and cultural leadership of a country, I’d wager that whatever points the US may have gained from taking a tough stand on Putin, it has lost more by its craven moral/military/diplomatic support to Israel as it continues to murder civilians at will.
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“Like, here in the USA (which you’ve declared as #1)”
– I haven’t yet. I’m saying it might be possible in the near future.
“you have a significant amount of population hating the back president, rampant xenophobia, talking about an armed uprising against FEDERAL TYRANNY, etc. Yet, nobody would say USA has degenerated into fascism.”
– There is always an unhinged fringe everywhere. In France, there is nothing but. I’ve been talking to quite a few academics who are escaping from France like it’s on fire. They are willing to go anywhere, pretty much.
“Maybe this is from my training in math and science, but at the very least, you should have some objective criteria (articles in top journals, scientific inventions per capita, books published per capita, award-winning movies/plays/tv shows, or whatever else you can think of).”
– No, this is all minutiae. I mean, real leadership. When I want to find out the latest developments in history, foreign affairs, political science, literary criticism, etc., and I will start picking up books by Americans. I’m not doing that yet. But I’m wondering if that will happen soon.
“You make it seem like USA has just recently snatched the heavyweight title by a dazzling knockout victory over France, all Rocky-like, by simply taking a tough stand on Putin.”
– It hasn’t snatched anything yet. All I’m saying that it might happen. Of course, there is always a possibility that somebody else will get there sooner.
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“I’d wager that whatever points the US may have gained from taking a tough stand on Putin, it has lost more by its craven moral/military/diplomatic support to Israel as it continues to murder civilians at will.”
– If Israel were not embroiled in a war without end, it might easily become the leader I’m talking about.
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“Where you live is, in most cases, irrelevant.”
– For an a academic, seriously? There is an enormous difference between being in a country with zero funding and jobs only being given to relatives and lovers and in a country where you can work and produce freely and have enough leisure to do that.
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“Where you live is, in most cases, irrelevant.”
I would disagree with this, though. There’s a reason why Saudi Arabia has had no intellectual output whatsoever. To foster any sort of creativity, you need to have basic human rights, including freedom of speech, safely in place.
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“To foster any sort of creativity, you need to have basic human rights, including freedom of speech, safely in place.”
– And that’s just the beginning. There also needs to be a fair amount of well-fed people with a lot of leisure and no worries about putting food on the table. But the security should not be too secure because that makes brains drown in fat. Then there needs to be a way to exchange ideas with one’s peers. That always involves having access to a language which will be recognized by peers from other countries. And even if all the conditions are met, there is no guarantee anything will come out of these propitious circumstances.
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I’m not sure what the drift of your post is since the first two paragraphs seem to be talking about something quite different than the rest of your post.
Succinctly: Nobody of my personal peer circle or family is interested in or was interested in permanently immigrating to Western Europe. Everyone in this group has at minimum a bachelor’s and a well used passport. Most of them have a master’s, a professional degree or a Ph.D. If any immigrating happens it’s to the US. When people whine about the brain drain, nobody whines about all the brilliant people going to Western Europe. Whether that’s a function of each country’s immigration rules or not, I’m not sure, but that’s reality.
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“Nobody of my personal peer circle or family is interested in or was interested in permanently immigrating to Western Europe. Everyone in this group has at minimum a bachelor’s and a well used passport. Most of them have a master’s, a professional degree or a Ph.D. If any immigrating happens it’s to the US. When people whine about the brain drain, nobody whines about all the brilliant people going to Western Europe.”
– That’s exactly what I’m saying. The EU has taken itself out as a serious player in more ways than one.
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I wasn’t talking specifically about academics. I don’t equate intellectual/cultural leadership with academics, although some academics may be intellectual leaders. All of my professors were quite competent, but I don’t think any of them were intellectual leaders. And, Stringer Bell, I said “in most cases” because I recognize that there are some countries where it is difficult for culture to flourish. My point is that we live in a world where Slavoj Zizek (discredited though he is) can be influential even though he lives in Slovenia. Saudi Arabia actually has a number of influential feminist artists, for example Manal AlDowayan.
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You miss the common denominator in the intellectual decline in western europe – multiculturalism, a noxious ideology that has produced nothing of value while devastating social cohesion and trust in societies that depended on that to function.
In other news, I’m off to Bulgaria and computer access will be essentially non-existent for about a week, до виждане!
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“You miss the common denominator in the intellectual decline in western europe..”
All those brown hordes lowering the white man’s IQ. 😦
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We all know where, for instance, the English-language literature would be without writers from India and Pakistan. (In the toilet, for those who don’t know.) So it isn’t the immigrants themselves that create a problem. It’s the policy of ghettoizing them, which is known as “multiculturalism.”
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Have fun in Bulgaria and come back soon! 🙂
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I am hoping it will be Ghana. There actually is a huge amount of brain drain from Africa and Asia into Europe. From the US to Western Europe not so much, but I certainly would have gone to Europe with its much higher salaries paid in Euros if the option had ever been there for me. The reason unemployed US Phds do not migrate to Europe in mass is due to the extreme difficulties in getting university jobs in those countries if you are a US citizen. The reason unemployed US Phds do not migrate to Africa in mass is just plain racism by people calling themselves “progressive.”
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“The reason unemployed US Phds do not migrate to Africa in mass is just plain racism by people calling themselves “progressive.””
– Good point.
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// The reason unemployed US Phds do not migrate to Africa in mass is just plain racism by people calling themselves “progressive.”
Aren’t African countries poor for the most part? In the 90ies Ukraine turned into a 3rd world country (the way my family experienced that) and even though my relatives still managed to earn money, it wasn’t nice. Wouldn’t want to live in extremely poor country, even if i had money myself.
Also, I have always thought Western European and USA cultures are similar enough, while African and Japanese cultures differ from the first two groups more. A person may prefer to live in a more similar culture, than move somewhere completely different.
Clarissa, you didn’t like FSU culture and left. Why can’t others not like and/or not being ready to adopt to African cultures?
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Ghana is a lot richer than Kyrgyzstan. The PPP is $4,000 a person vs. $3,200. In Ghana everybody speaks English and 80% are western Christians. Ghana strikes me as more similar to Australia or the US south than any other country I have been in. The main difference in both cases is that most of the people are Black. But, the language, the religion, much of the popular culture, etc. is much closer to the US than anything in continental Europe.
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My friend from Nigeria was always a lot lot lot easier for me to understand than anybody from Ukraine. And he was completely at home here in the US from day 1 in a way I still can’t manage to be after 16 years on the continent.
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// – If Israel were not embroiled in a war without end, it might easily become the leader I’m talking about.
May be, one day it will happen. 🙂 But isn’t my country too small for that? I don’t think we are smarter than others (*) and there are much less people than in other countries, thus less really talented people may be born.
(*) There was some survey about supposedly higher IQ of Europian Jews, but if true, it was a legacy of antisemitism and no surveys were done on non Europian Jews. In Israel everybody becomes mixed after a couple of generations, btw.
Average Israeli isn’t smarter than average German, imo.
// All those brown hordes lowering the white man’s IQ. 😦
They don’t, but if a country is undergoing a crisis, it does. Part of reasons for crisis are indeed connected to (partly self inflicted) ghettoisation of immigrants.
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“Part of reasons for crisis are indeed connected to (partly self inflicted) ghettoisation of immigrants.”
– That’s exactly what I just said. Scary. 🙂
“But isn’t my country too small for that?”
– It really isn’t the size that matters in these issues. There is a certain country that is the largest in the world, yet all it has been able to do is invade and oppress people.
“I don’t think we are smarter than others (*)”
– It isn’t about biology or genes, of course. But the culture of being Jewish – completely aside from all the dorky religious stuff – is and has always been about learning, studying, engaging in intellectual pursuits. It’s the culture of The Book. It’s also a culture that was excluded from getting an education the easy way, so one was conditioned from birth – I know I was – to study that much harder than everybody else because I was Jewish. Didn’t I share the story of my father behaving like all his relatives died a painful death when I got 98% on a test back in college? There was no persuading him that 98% was an outstanding result. He was carrying the historic memory of all of his ancestors who were barred from education because they were not at 105%, which was the only thing that could give a Jew a chance to get anywhere.
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Damn, if one generation getting excluded from getting an education the easy way (my grandparents’ generation – unhealthy origins in newly Communist Romania) was the root of pressures to succeed academically bordering on the ridiculous, I can only imagine what centuries of being barred from education does to a culture.
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// (*) There was some survey about supposedly higher IQ of Europian Jews, but if true, it was a legacy of antisemitism and no surveys were done on non Europian Jews. In Israel everybody becomes mixed after a couple of generations, btw.
I wanted to say that in Israel there is no antisemitism to function as a driving force for success.
Also, I don’t think non European Jews are worse than other peoples. What I do think is that those IQ tests were done on a few European Jews alone. How well you do on them depends on the culture one is from.
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“I wanted to say that in Israel there is no antisemitism to function as a driving force for success.”
– There is the desert, the war, the feeling of being under siege, the trauma of the Holocaust that is not going anywhere for a very very long time to come. I recently read an account of a trip to Israel from a blogger who was quite anti-semitic and always hated Israel. But that account was populated with, “You’ve got to give it to Jews, they have made a freaking garden out of this desert. This is incredible!”
I should have saved the link for you.
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“I wanted to say that in Israel there is no antisemitism to function as a driving force for success.”
– Historic memory doesn’t fade for a long, long time.
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I wonder how this Blue Card system will change things for Germany. Had this system existed in the 70s, perhaps my uncle would have stayed? (He went back to India.) I just remembered my one friend, who just moved to Germany (she works in HR, and transferred in the same company; her husband is in IT). But would they actually want to stay past four years? Hmm…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/the-new-land-of-opportunity-for-immigrants-is-germany/2014/07/27/93464262-7eff-4931-817c-786db6d21ec8_story.html
But Germany also is looking beyond Europe for prospective workers, with German factories courting Indian engineers and German universities competing for Chinese students. In 2012, Germany simplified the process for immigrants from outside the E.U. In 2013, Germany introduced a “Blue Card” system, effectively granting entry to anyone with a university degree and a job offer with a minimum salary of $50,000 to $64,000 a year, depending on the field. As a result, the average immigrant moving to Germany is better educated and more skilled than the average German.
To a far smaller degree, Germany also is reaching out to the jobless. In 2013, the government launched a special program aimed at young, unemployed Europeans ages 18 to 35, covering their travel, language courses and living costs while offering them vocational training in Germany. Interest in the $609 million program proved so overwhelming, however, that the German government had to cease taking new applicants in April.
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Speaking of leadership.
http://jpohl.blogspot.com/2014/07/once-again-we-are-on-strike-over-our.html
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// Hungary has become a place it is too shameful even to notice
PUTIN’S MINI-ME
The Mask Is Off
Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has openly renounced Western-style democracy for the nationalist authoritarianism of Putin’s Russia.
http://www.the-american-interest.com/articles/2014/08/07/the-mask-is-off/
“Second, he would have to deepen his friendship with Russia, the country with demonstrated interest in a weak and divided Ukraine. As Hungary is already almost fully dependent on Russian energy for the next three decades, the best way left for Orbán to please Putin is to echo the latter’s anti-American harangues and weaken the European Union from within.
Third, the European Union and the United States would have to ignore what Hungary is doing or might be planning to do. That would encourage Orbán to pursue his historic mission.”
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