Of the historic phenomena that will be analyzed in a few years with great interest and curiosity is Europe’s current love affair with self-flagellation when confronted with its identity and history. Full of high and low lights, right and wrong turns, Europe’s history is reflection of human history, neither better nor worse than the history of other parts of the globe. But such a banal and obvious fact seems to escape the intellectual and political elites of Europe, who prefer to embrace irrational myths.     

 

Europe is starting to fall into the habit of warming to anyone who makes a fortune off insulting the Old World’s legacy. Europe has turned into a refuge where dictators and those aspiring to become dictators unleash their obsessions with a degree of success, and soak in the applause of a bunch European Parliamentarians who want to show their solidarity with the world’s peoples while living the high-life thanks to capitalism. Liberalism’s pudgy children welcome anyone capable of feeding their anti-liberal and anti-American obsessions. 

 

Not long ago, Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez put their obsessions on display for a decrepit Europe. In his short time in power, Morales has shown little more than an ability to steal retired Bolivians’ investment funds. Chavez continues to submerge his country in uncertainty, and is obsessed with becoming South America’s new Che. Perhaps he is motivated by the ghost of Bolivar who, it is said, has his own chair at the cabinet meetings. Both appear to be driving their countries to economic doom, all the while obsessed with annoying the United States however possible.   

 

It didn’t take either one very long to give the European political and media world its favorite candy: self-proclaim themselves the empire’s “bad boys;” as usual, the average Bolivian and Venezuelan will be the one paying for such bravado. Even more serious was when Zapatero’s new partners’ sarcastically referred to the Caracas-Havana-La Paz alliance as the “Axis of evil.” Aside from their historic illiteracy, these two bring with them disgusting errors; from the “Evil Empire,” responsible for the greatest number of murders in history, to the “Axis of Evil,” quoted by Bush, in which millions of Koreans die from hunger while that country works on its nuclear power. And only a few decades ago, a similar number of defenseless Iranians were thrown up against Saddam’s bellicose plans.   

 

In their obsession to prance and buck in front of the White House, Morales and Chavez make fun of the past century’s massacres. And in doing so, the European political class receives them with complicit and amused laughter. Europe’s elites could care less about the fate of the citizens in Venezuela and Bolivia; they have spent the better part of half a century forcing Cuba to be the world’s brothel. And they do it just to spite the United States and Europe’s own tradition of liberal democracy. Tomorrow’s historians won’t lack for material.