A public fight is breaking out in Europe, where the welfare model is breaking down along the southern rim -- Greece, Italy, Spain, maybe France -- as well as in the former Celtic Tiger of Ireland.  Those countries are the equivalent of welfare frauds, with centuries of experience in beating taxes, laws, and regulations.  The Italians figured out how to beat imperial decrees back in Roman times, and they never stopped honing their skills.  Cheating on taxes is a high art form in Italy.

The harder-working Northern European countries, like Germany and Britain, are furious at the welfare cheats, as if they haven't always subsidized their own cheating classes to keep their socialist parties in power.  With Arab countries from Egypt to Tunisia close to keeling over and running out of money for food imports, the whole Mediterranean basin is in crisis with the sole exception of Israel, which is becoming a new Silicon Valley.

Considering how Europe enjoyed its orchestrated rage, scandal-mongering, and catcalling at the Bush administration only a few years ago, I'd say it couldn't happen to a nicer subcontinent.

Europe's rage against the U.S. was a pure repetition of its previous anti-foreigner rages -- the Germans against the French, the Brits against the foreigners, the Russians against everybody else.  This time the scapegoat was the United States, with Israel playing Little Satan.

Europe hasn't really enjoyed a good self-righteous fit of anti-foreigner rage since the Franco-Prussian War.  Certainly the Soviets never got that kind of public abuse, because, well, they were scary.

If we could only get all the demagogues to go and live in socialist Europe, as they are always promising to do, I'd be tickled pink.  We could sell them the New York Times and WaPo, and import European refugees who want to work for a living.

Europe is now supposed to be in the biggest crisis since the Marshall Plan.  Frau Angela Merkel takes the failure of the eurozone to mean that the EU needs to be even more controlling than it already is, even after 30,000 top-down regulations flowing from Brussels to prescribe everything down to the size of tomatoes and the proper curvature of bananas. 

In the aftermath of immense destruction from World War Two, two crafty Eurocrats got together in 1955 to plan a new, united Europe to take the place of two centuries of regular revenge wars between France and Germany, with Russia and Britain always tilting to the weaker side to hold back the stronger one.  The two founding Eurocrats were Jean Monet and Robert Schumann.  They created the political core that runs Europe today, the Franco-German axis.

The European Union is the result of their labors, complete with goose-stepping color guard; a European Parliament that is elected but can't pass any actual laws; a new national anthem (Beethoven's Choral Movement, the most mobocratic composition of his whole life); a flag; a fiscal Eurozone that is now breaking apart; and above all, a ruling bureaucracy in the old, corrupt, and power-hungry tradition of Europe's aristocracies going back to the Middle Ages.

The EU-SSR, as some wags call it, is not really European -- it's a multicultural Potemkin Village, based on a wholesale rejection of Europe's past, including all of Christianity, Judaism, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and electoral democracy.

Nor is it a union.  The EU is a replay of the Holy Roman Empire, which Edward Gibbon pointed out was not holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

The urge to unify Europe under a single emperor goes back to Julius Caesar, and it has inspired everybody from Charlemagne and the pope to the Romanoffs, the Hapsburgs, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, and now the European Union.

It has never worked, but they keep trying.  It's a kind of continental tic.  Nobody can make it work.  They keep doing it.

The EU today is two dozen countries scrambling to find an identity that will not throw them back into a dark and bloody past.  That is the one and only good reason for the existence of the European Union, and it is the only one that is never stated openly.  Europhiles constantly boast that they, and they alone, have finally realized the ancient dream of peace and love forever and ever -- pure Leninist propaganda from that other bloody empire, the Soviet Union, and all its much-abused colonies.  But Europhiliacs believe it.

Ask any faithful reader of the New York Times or the UK Guardian, and they will parrot the Euro-myth that the EU is the closest thing to socialist heaven ever seen.  But that's only for propeller-heads.  Nobody really believes it.  Certainly no politician.  That's just Euro-pap to sucker the masses.

The EU is above all a bureaucratic empire that dreams of conquering the world for an even greater  bureaucratic empire.  That's why Labourite Tony Blair sponsored the global warming fraud, in collaboration with Algore and the Demagogues.  That's also why Europe launched a hysterical propaganda assault on George W. Bush and the United States for daring to knock over Saddam Hussein.  (They were also annoyed with George Bush for interrupting their Oil for Food payoffs from Saddam, tens of billions of dollars that were supposed to feed Iraqi children, but which were used instead to buy off the United Nations and France.)

Most of the brainwashed masses in Europe still believed that Bush and Cheney invaded Iraq to steal all the oil -- when Middle East oil is the very lifeblood of Europe itself.  In a massive fit of Green self-righteousness, the Germans have just decided to phase out all their nuclear reactors, a move that will make them inevitably even more dependent on Saudi oil and Russian natural gas.  Vladimir Putin used to be the KGB Rezident in the Soviet satrapy of East Germany, and if you think he hasn't kept his agent network alive in Germany today, you don't know Vlad.

Fortunately, by a miracle of Western science and engineering, vast new discoveries of shale-based natural gas all over the world are even now signaling the end of the OPEC monopoly, no matter how much green demagogues try to fight it.  If I were the Saudis, I'd be paying off Algore and the greens to protect my monopoly.  But shale gas is a done deal, and it doesn't matter if it gets blocked in Montana or Canada, because enormous deposits have been found in Poland, the Eastern Med, and surely in many countries that aren't telling us yet.

Our moron media are obsessed with phony "peak oil" limits, but that will fade soon enough when they finally see the new age of plentiful, clean energy from shale-based natural gas.  All that hysteria for nothing.

The EU, U.N., and the Demagogue Party specialize in exploiting artificial shortages, like the Chicago Carbon Exchange, which recently crumbled when investors figured out the scam was up.  If you could convince the bubbleheads of the world that there's a shortage of breathable air, you could make them pay for every breath they take, and levy taxes per inhale and exhale.

Which is the principle behind media witch hunts against oil, nuclear power, carbon-based fuels, and, on the flip-side, the celebration of purely imaginary solar energy, wind power, and cold fusion.

The only inexhaustible energy source on earth is human gullibility.  The European Union is completely run by it.

But the EU does have one very solid rationale.  It's not the speedy advent of paradise on earth.  It's the very real fear of falling back into Europe's bloody past.

The answer to that is actually quite simple.  The core of the European Union is Germany and France.  Everything else is expendable.  The Eurozone could drop Southern Europe today, or, more likely, encourage all those bankrupt countries to go to a separate currency.  Britain has never been comfortable with EU imperialism -- except for British politicians and the bureaucrats, who saw fabulous new career prospects in Brussels.  Ireland is now dependent on EU subsidies and won't last long financially if the southern rim goes bankrupt.  The Swedes, Danes, Finns, and Norwegians have always been too snooty anyway.  And the Russians would be pleased to see Europe fragmenting again.  They have long memories in Moscow, now that they are back to the Russian Orthodox Church instead of the Communist Party.

A side benefit of such a realignment would be that Europe would remember the lessons of its past.  The very idea of Europe starts with the resistance to Saracen invaders; that's what the first European epic, the Song of Roland, is all about.  The bad old Crusades were arguably a reaction to Mohammedan imperialism.  Europe was assaulted by Muslim armies from the south and east for centuries.  And yes, Europe also learned from Muslims, because warring peoples always engage in trade, talking, and exchange of information, as well as fighting. 

Still, Muslim imperialism comes straight from the Koran.  Christianity can make peace without changing its fundamental nature.  Islam cannot -- not without reforming the Koran.  Don't hold your breath.

There is therefore much to be said for a Franco-German constitutional alliance -- not that constitutions last very long over there.  It would reduce the fear of a return of the bad old bloody past.  It would create a great deal of sobriety, instead of Europhiliac self-glorification that is the real echo of Europe's imperialistic past.  It would allow for a more rational version of the old great power balance, and it might even force Europe to start paying for its own military defenses, instead of relying on Uncle Sucker all the time.

A sensible realignment would liberate European nations to be themselves again.  It could preserve a successful economic Eurozone as well as free trade and travel.  It could keep the good parts and throw away the phony pretenses.  Political bubbles don't last any more than market bubbles do.

A sobered Europe could even revive the NATO alliance -- a desperately needed alliance against an ancient ideology of war that's going nuclear in the coming months -- among genuinely democratic nations.

Now there's a novel idea.