PRESCIENCE REWARDED:

Like many of you, I look at Europe, and think: this cannot end well. I can imagine civil order breaking down in Greece, riots, political paralysis, and a coup. Is it absurd to imagine Italy splitting? A German co-prosperity sphere with Euro-rule transferred from Brussels to Berlin? Perhaps I’ve been watching too many WW2 documentaries lately, but they have a necessary reminder: things fail. And another: tribalism is bred in the marrow. Everything modern about Europe is transnational – the architecture, the politics, the thin smear of high culture that passes for art, it has a brash modern style divorced from national identities. Divorced from Europe’s sullen husband, History.

People don’t want to be cut off from national identity; the more you suppress it, the nastier it gets when it’s let out of the hole. I think the idea of war in Europe is ridiculous – the question of “over what” is matched only by “with what,” but it just seems as if some Great Shuddering is due.

—James Lileks, the Bleat, June 20th, 2012.

● “STICK A FORK IN EUROPE: It’s Done.”

—Headline, Director Blue, this past Thursday.

Related: Found via Kathy Shaidle, Mark Steyn adds,”Frau Merkel will have achieved what Bomber Harris and the Red Army couldn’t: she will have wiped Germany off the map.”