Europe is a Powder Keg
Americans who don’t spend time in Europe might not fully appreciate what a powder keg the Old World has become. However bad social relations in the United States now are, they are at least an order of magnitude worse on the other side of the Atlantic. European self-hatred is dissolving traditional cultural bonds. Mass immigration is compounding age-old rivalries. Europe is one spark away from exploding.
Europe is a perennial battlefield. Many of our ancestors, after all, left the old country to escape religious, economic, and cultural conflicts that had endured for centuries. Those historic grievances — always simmering in times of peace before boiling over into outright violence — are passed from one generation to the next. Modern European nations are the product of two thousand years of shifting borders and alliances, and native Europeans trace their family lineages back to regional tribes whose ancient territories do not fit neatly within the politically drawn maps of today.
If you think geographical accents in America make it tricky for a Mississippian or Minnesotan to communicate effectively with an English-speaker from the Bronx, consider that Europe is home to nearly three hundred native tongues. Switzerland has four national languages — including Romansch, which derives from the spoken Latin of the Roman Empire. The cornucopia of indigenous languages, dialects, vocabularies, and accents makes it possible for local residents of small towns to recognize “outsiders” immediately. Even more impressively, they can usually tell — just by listening — which towns a stranger’s grandparents once called home.
Two world wars — both ignited in Europe and responsible for immense European destruction — propelled a mid-twentieth-century political movement calling for the eradication of national borders. The European intelligentsia who became the founding members of the continent’s fledgling transnational bureaucracy blamed national pride for Europe’s carnage and effectively turned “nationalism” into a dirty word.
Oddly, this was also a time when crumbling empires, such as France and the United Kingdom, were at least tepidly supporting the national independence of former colonies. Likewise, it was the beginning of a half-century U.S.-led campaign to encourage national revolutions in European countries stuck behind the Soviet Union’s Iron Curtain. So Western power brokers framed nationalism as a kind of intolerable ethos on par with Mussolini’s fascism and Hitler’s national socialism while encouraging former nations or proto-nations in Central Europe, Africa, and Asia to break away from the respective empires that controlled them. While Western leaders pushed for the integration of distinct European nations into a single “Union,” they also promoted national independence movements under the rationale that all humans possess a natural right to self-determination.
In the eighty years since the project for European integration began in earnest, those latent contradictions have transformed Europe into a tinderbox with even greater potential energy for self-destruction than existed before WWI and II. While the bureaucratic ruling class has actively repressed the historic identities of native Europeans, it has flooded the continent with foreigners who are encouraged to retain their own cultural identities. In this way, a Hungarian or Pole or Dane who celebrates his country’s unique heritage is denounced as a “far-right nationalist,” while a Frenchman who insists that African and Middle Eastern immigrants assimilate to the European way of life is denounced as a “racist” and “bigot.”
This anti-European monstrosity was created deliberately. Simultaneous suppression of Europeans’ national identities and protections for foreign nationals create a kind of “multiculturalism dynamo” that converts Europeans into something alien. Stripped of their native religion, culture, and historic customs and forced to praise foreign religions, cultures, and customs taking hold in the West’s civilizational void, Europeans are effectively assimilated within their own lands. Europeans are taught to despise their own civilization and to bow down before those who seek to replicate a foreign civilization inside Europe. Europe’s bureaucratic ruling class uses foreigners to beat the Europeanness out of Europeans.
Perhaps because a critical mass of Europeans finally realizes what Europe’s unelected bureaucrats have done, a “Great Awakening” is spreading across the continent. After decades of submitting to cultural erasure, a patriotic fervor is taking root once again. As many now see it, if globalism’s war on nationalism means that only nations outside Europe will survive, then European peace is not worth the cost.
Many Americans will dismiss this resurgence of European nationalism as “too little, too late,” but I would strike a more optimistic chord. Sometimes we must be pushed to the edge of the cliff before we find our footing and forcefully fight back. When surrender means falling into the sea and survival requires moving in the opposite direction, the right choice is also the only one.
In the United Kingdom, a grassroots movement of ordinary Brits has initiated “Operation: Raise the Colors.” The strategy is simple: British citizens are encouraged to prominently display and wave the Cross of St. George and Union Jack flags.
What could possibly be offensive or dangerous about raising the flags of England and the United Kingdom? Nothing. Yet the globalist Establishment is losing its collective mind. Leftists insist that the flags should be replaced with something more “multicultural” and that only “far-right racists” would stoop so low as to patriotically raise the country’s flags. Open-borders politicians are calling the flag-waving “extremist,” “hate-filled,” and “white supremacist.” In other words, the British people have forced Britain’s “elites” to acknowledge that they have no loyalty to and only antipathy for the United Kingdom.
This rather anodyne form of political speech is proving remarkably effective at exposing globalism’s suicidal contagion. In London, it is perfectly normal to see so-called “gay pride” flags, “Palestinian” flags, Pakistani flags, Iranian flags, and the flags of almost every third-world nation now offloading its citizens onto the shores of the U.K. If a British citizen were to express outrage over the fact that a panoply of foreign flags is flown brazenly throughout the capital, constables would intimidate the outspoken “offender” into silence by threatening him with prosecution for imaginary “hate speech.” Revealingly, however, these same petty tyrants throw hissy fits when native Brits dare “raise the colors” of their own nation’s historic flags.
Similar movements are picking up steam. Ten years ago, it was more common to see such patriotic displays on the streets of Balkan nations or amid independence parades in the Basque region or other areas of Europe seeking national recognition. Today it is easy to stumble into a sea of Dutch, Danish, German, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Hungarian, Polish, Czech, or Greek flags when crossing borders. Eighty years after the European Union began constructing its continental empire, the “colonies” appear eager to reclaim their right to self-determination.
I think it’s fair to say that ordinary Europeans are no longer willing to remain quiet as the bureaucratic ruling class kills what’s left of Europe and hands the carcass to foreign conquerors. As an American with absolute fidelity to the millennia-long promises of Western civilization, I find these patriotic revivals timely rebuttals to a globalist Establishment that prefers our death.
I cannot tell you how many times I have come across the words of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas translated into one of Europe’s many native languages. “Do not go gentle into that good night” and “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” show up on message boards like faint heartbeats on an EKG machine. Many in Europe don’t want to die. To live, they’ll have to fight.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/09/europe_is_a_powder_keg.html