Declan Hayes
Somewhat like today's combined NATO powers, France's Kings Louis XIV and XV had squandered far too much of their nation's treasure on foreign wars.
Although Ursula von der Leyen, Kaja Kallas, Zelensky, Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron will have a gay old-time watching the studs of the French Foreign Legion swagger their way down the Champs-Élysées this July 14 th, it does raise the question as to why France and the world bothers with this annual extravagance, which commemorates the July 14th 1789 jailbreak of seven upper class forgers by an enraged mob, who then went on to "liberate" the Marquis de Sade, who was one of hell's most depraved devils ever to take human form.
Although de Sade, like Diderot, Rousseau and Voltaire deserves his own share of the blame for the carnage the storming of the Bastille presaged, the French kings and their economic advisors, who plunged France into the chaos of its Revolutionary era, deserve much more because, as we'll show with the current scams of Trump and von der Leyen, they remain much more relevant than Voltaire who, despite all his undoubted eloquence, never said or wrote anything of note, or of Rousseau, whom Lion Feuchtwanger brilliantly lampoons in his classic work on the French Revolutionary era.
Somewhat like today's combined NATO powers, France's Kings Louis XIV and XV had squandered far too much of their nation's treasure on foreign wars and, much like Spain during the 80 years' war for Dutch "freedom", had a very inefficient tax raising base. Bad and all as that was, it was compounded by quack economists propounding quack solutions to resolve the Ancien Régime's eventually fatal fiscal problems.
Chief among these con artists was Scottish charlatan John Law, whose company's legacy remains the Louisiana purchase, as well as spin-off terms like nouveau riche, millionaire and thank God for Mississippi. Law's solution to France's travails was to have a land-backed debt system, where the basin of the Mississippi river would form his company's collateral. Law's quick-fix solution was as popular in France as the South Sea bubble was in Blighty or the tulip mania had been in the Netherlands and fortunes were made as the debt instruments, backed by Louisiana's untapped riches, soared in value.
The problem with all this was there were no riches, tapped or otherwise. Louisiana was sparsely populated, alligator infested swamp land of little intrinsic value and, as with those concomitant pyramid schemes in the Netherlands and Britain, it eventually collapsed and left France ripe for revolution by those nouveau riche millionaires it had impoverished as quickly as it had previously enriched them.
Although Britain had comparable problems, the 1694 foundation of the Bank of England stabilised its realm to a degree the French monarchs could only envy. Although Napoleon, Hitler and other upstarts did their best to upset the applecart down the years, Europe's trajectory of public debt being the driving force of the nation was successfully pioneered by the Bank of England, the City of London and similar creatures of the night.
The much longer trajectory, of which Bastille Day was but an ultimately inconsequential solitary data point, was misery at home and imperial mayhem abroad. One only has to read any of the great French nineteenth century novelists or look at Africa's Victorian era experiences to see the veracity of the statement that powerful, predatory nations are launching sites for the imperial interests of money lending oligarchies. Stock markets need new horizons to conquer and public debt is needed to fund the gunboat diplomacy they depend on. This has been an almost iron law of international gunboat diplomacy since the Bank of England first set up shop.
Scanning today's blue horizons, we land on a certain Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, who has had hundreds of billions of dollars of his nation's wealth stolen from him by the West's central bankers. Putin's main crime and one they cannot forgive him for is lifting Russia up from the gutter the collapse of the Soviet Union threw it headlong into. Pre-Putin, post-Soviet Russia was in a shameful state and the so-called seven bankers, who worked hand in glove with the West, were largely responsible for that. Had Putin not clipped their wings, Russia would today be like Sudan or Syria. Russia's resurgence under Putin is the greatest comeback since Lazarus and that is no exaggeration.
And nor is it an exaggeration to say that that the battles Putin and those aligned to him face can be traced right back, through French Revolutionary and counter-Revolutionary times, through the foundation of the Bank of England all the way back to Deuteronomy where God tells Israel and hucksters like Yankee Ambassador Mike Huckabee, to nuke away to their heart's content because God conveniently wills it. Not only is this mad cap Cromwelian justification for genocide at the heart of the Evangelical and Zionist Manifest Destiny doctrines but it is leveraged to the nth degree by the widely held doctrine of predestination that reverberates not only in NATO's corridors of power but in the unlikeliest of other places as well.
In contrast to Putin's Russia, France and all of the West refuse to learn new tricks but, then again, why should they if God, or at least their God, is on their side. They still have two-faced Zionist karaoke charlatans like Bernard Henri Lévy justifying their wars of conquest and they have idiots like von der Leyen promising to levy more taxes to spread their dubious toxins far and wide. It is still full steam ahead, LGBT marches in Budapest and Beijing today and tomorrow, if God wills it, the vast riches of Siberia and all of Russia and Iran to squander.
Zum letzten Mal wird Sturmalarm geblasen!
Zum Kampfe steh'n wir alle schon bereit!
Schon flattern Hitlerfahnen über allen Straßen.
Die Knechtschaft dauert nur noch kurze Zeit!
All very well, but there is considerable prep work to be done before von der Leyen's Panzers and Macron's Bastille jocks strike out for Moscow once again. As these reports here and here show, Europe has still some €33.5 trillion in household savings and, as I previously opined, bums like von der Leyen, Macron and former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta are determined to get their hands on it, so they can squander it on Ukraine and similar imperialist adventures, which will line their pockets, even as they bankrupt more Europeans, just as Trump's Big Beautiful Bill is doing across the pond, where his sponsors will get richer at the expense of his minimum wage, MAGA hat wearing electoral base.
Though increased European regulation and increased American deregulation are two cheeks of the same backside, they work for the same end result, which is the impoverishment of the masses to the benefit of the leaders, their sponsors and their media mouth pieces. And it is for that end result that today's Voltaires, Rousseaus and Diderots earn their keep. I am thinking here not only of Lévy but also of the likes of Ayn Rand and the other prophets of untrammelled Anglo-American predatory capitalism, who have streamlined the rantings of yesteryear to justify the wealth grabs of our era through such sleights of hand as franchising, private equity firms, vulture funds, share buybacks and all the other pickpocketing tricks, which have made Mississippi and much of the rest of the United States hell on earth for most folk who live there. Although many reasons can be cited for why Mississippi and much of France are the basket cases that they are, one big reason is that, unlike Japan, Russia and China, communal cohesion and solidarity have largely been done away with helped, in no small measure, by today's equivalents of the afore-mentioned parlour room parasites who paved the way to the storming of the Bastille.
Leaving aside that von der Leyen, Macron and the rest of them have nothing of worth to give the world, there is a fundamental difference between Putin's Russia, Xi's China and the gangrenous wasteland these Western warlords rule over. Russia, not unlike Canada or Australia, is resource rich and resources, as well as the Canadian, Russian and Australian currencies tied to them, have intrinsic value on that account. China, like Japan, makes stuff and making stuff adds value.
Europe, for its part, makes nothing, except for ostentatious Bastille Day parades, where people with dubious sexual perversions get to gawk at the sterile studs of the French Foreign Legion. This is not to say that the Europeans cannot make stuff. They can but they recently decided to aid the United States in blowing up Nordstream, their source of cheap energy and telling Russia, whose pocket their central bankers picked, they wanted no further relations with her. That is like Marie Antoinette's croissant maker refusing the miller's flour and telling the miller she'll deliver him over to the Marquis de Sade's dungeon if given the chance. It is, like the writings of de Sade himself, sheer lunacy
This is not to say that all French writing is a waste of time. It is not and Frédéric Bastiat is but one of several French economists who have been candles in the dark. But Europe needs much more than French or Chinese made candles and all the 4th of July Yankee style fireworks France lets loose on Bastille Day are, like the words of von der Leyen and her clones, just so much empty froth. Europe is saddled with as much deadweight as France was on 13th July, 1789 and all that deadweight has to be done away with, lock, stock and stinking barrel. If there are any ongoing lessons we can take from the storming of the Bastille and its violent aftermath, it is that von der Leyen, Macron and their husbands will not go quietly into that good night where they belong and Europe will, sooner or later, have to once more wade through rivers of blood if it is to achieve even the barest semblance of the liberté, égalité, fraternité the French Foreign Legion's idiotic Bastille Day duck walk is supposed to be all about.