Marcas Breatnach 🇮🇪 ⋆⁺₊🎃´₊⁺

PAIN IS THE ONLY TEACHER LEFT FOR IRELAND AND THE REST OF EUROPE. Alastair Crooke who was born in Dún Laoghaire, Ireland in 1949, and has had quite the career, whom quite unremarkably and many years ago I had the pleasure of meeting, has declared the following, which is in a conversational tone and not a prepared article, but is nevertheless devastatingly accurate: "Pain is the only thing that changes a locked position. Europe has no jobs because it destroyed its manufacturing, and it has no policy except war on Russia. France and Britain are already deep in crisis. The question is how much of it Europe will take before it asks whether attacking Russia is in Europe’s interest at all. I think when you get into that sort of state where things seem so completely deadlocked, the only thing that really changes people’s perception and their ability to change position is pain. And I think pain may come from a different area, but it may come from the economic situation, where France and Britain are in deep economic crisis, and most of Europe is in a catastrophic economic crisis and employment crisis. There are no jobs because they got rid of their manufacturing industry and all those jobs. If they come back, it’ll be Chinese manufacturing. And if you look inside a Chinese factory, count how many blue-collar workers you see on the assembly line. You won’t see any. There will be just one data engineer in the whole place. And then most of the service industries are now managed by others who’ve come in. People have immigrated into Europe. They serve many of these, and young people who leave university with a law degree - AI has cut out one whole layer of middle-class, young middle-class jobs which are now going to be taken over by AI. So there are going to be no jobs and no prosperity because inflation and price rises are surging in Europe. I mean, I come back from London; prices are unbelievable. So they don’t know what to do. So will they change? I think only pain. If the crisis is deep enough, people are going to say to them, in the AfD in Germany and others, Mélenchon in France. Mélenchon just said we are going to leave NATO. He said, if he’s President, we are going to leave NATO. And so there are people beginning to say it, but unfortunately I think it’s going to require more pain before we get to the point where people say, let’s think this through from the beginning and let’s see what is the interest of Europe at this stage. Is our interest to go on attacking Russia? Do we think that that is going to change Russia? Is he going to change the Russian position? Is Putin about to disappear? No? Well, then perhaps we ought to rethink our policies. And I think that’s what we can only hope will come about from this. Pain is the only teacher left for Europe."