Courageous Discourse
Does Europe Yearn for Another General Bloodletting?

By John Leake
Napoleonic Wars, Crimean, Franco-Prussian, World War I, World War II. Has it been too long? Do the Europeans now long for the cathartic release of mass killing?
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once remarked that “mankind is doomed to vacillate eternally between boredom and distress.” Have Europe’s leaders grown bored with the long period of peace that has prevailed on most of their Continent since 1945? Do they long for the cathartic release of pent up aggression and negative feelings?
It’s a notable fact that pretty much every serious combat veteran of the Second World War is now gone, which means there is no living witness of the horror of a general war on the European Continent.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has started using Churchillian language since Trump sent Zelensky packing, as though there is a shred of evidence that Vladimir Putin aspires to make a move against Great Britain in the way Hitler did in 1940. I suspect that Starmer is now scheming to escalate hostilities between Russia and Great Britain in whatever way he can.
For three years now I have been posing the question: Why didn’t the Biden administration and its European lackeys at least TRY to work out a neutrality deal like the neutrality deal the Americans and English struck with Russia for Austria in 1955—a deal the Russians have honored ever since?
If Putin had agreed to Ukrainian neutrality and then subsequently violated it, the U.S. and England would have then had a clear casus belli. To this day, not a single member of the pro war faction has even tried to answer my question.
I sometimes wonder if it would be edifying for the Europeans and for many Americans to experience combat in the way the German soldier and writer, Ernst Jünger experienced it. During World War I, Jünger was wounded 14 times, including a .30 rifle shot through the chest.
In his book Storm of Steel, he described his war experience in a strangely detached way, observing and recording extreme acts of violence simultaneously inflicted on thousands of men. He observes the mass destruction and mutilation of young soldiers without passing any judgement. Humans periodically wage war, and he happens to be there to observe an exceptionally terrible one.
In the following passage, Jünger describes how quickly he grew accustomed to the business of war.
During one stop on the way, a driver split his thumb in the course of crank-starting his lorry. The sight of the wound almost made me ill, I have always been sensitive to such things. I mention this because it seems virtually unaccountable as I witnessed such terrible mutilation in the course of the following days. It’s an example of the way in which one’s response to an experience is actually largely determined by its context.
It appears that Starmer et al. are now so determined to have their Churchillian moments that they will make a general European war with Russia inevitable, perhaps with the intention of forcing the Americans to get involved.
Many American and European citizens are apparently delighted to send billions of money and weapons to Ukraine and to let young Ukrainian men do the fighting. I wonder how many young American and European men would be willing to go to Ukraine to do the fighting themselves. In a detached, Jüngerian sort of way, I wonder if the experience would expand their consciousness and provide some sort of moral instruction or edification.
With so many apparently longing to teach the Russian devils a lesson, perhaps they should seriously consider joining the fight as volunteers for the Ukrainian army.
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Courageous Discourse
Europe Had 127,350 Cases of Measles in 2024

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH
US Mainstream Media Maintains Myopic Focus on Less than 1000 Cases
As the measles story in the US continues to unfold with reporting of a few cases here and there come in through mainstream media, I wondered about measles in Europe.
The WHO casually reported that the Europe Region had 127,350 cases in 2024.
According to an analysis by WHO and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 127 350 measles cases were reported in the European Region for 2024, double the number of cases reported for 2023 and the highest number since 1997.
Children under 5 accounted for more than 40% of reported cases in the Region – comprising 53 countries in Europe and central Asia. More than half of the reported cases required hospitalization. A total of 38 deaths have been reported, based on preliminary data received as of 6 March 2025.
Measles cases in the Region have generally been declining since 1997, when some 216 000 were reported, reaching a low of 4440 cases in 2016. However, a resurgence was seen in 2018 and 2019 – with 89 000 and 106 000 cases reported for the 2 years respectively. Following a backsliding in immunization coverage during the COVID-19 pandemic, cases rose significantly again in 2023 and 2024. Vaccination rates in many countries are yet to return to pre-pandemic levels, increasing the risk of outbreaks.
Many regions in Europe have lower rates of measles vaccination than the goal of 95%.
Less than 80% of eligible children in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Romania were vaccinated with MCV1 in 2023 – far below the 95% coverage rate required to retain herd immunity. In both Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro the coverage rate for MCV1 has remained below 70% and 50% respectively for the past 5 or more years. Romania reported the highest number of cases in the Region for 2024, with 30 692 cases, followed by Kazakhstan with 28 147 cases.
The WHO Report does not mention adjudication of hospitalizations or deaths. Presumably hospitalization of healthy kids is routine for contagion control. So if measles is so common and presumably well-handled by Europe, why is it such a big deal in the United States? Don’t look for Sanjay Gupta or Anderson Cooper to tell you that a similar size region and population handles >100K cases per year without much fanfare.
Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH
President, McCullough Foundation
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Courageous Discourse
Europe Turns Totalitarian

In case anyone doubted what Vice President J.D. Vance said in Munich back in February, I can confirm that everything he said was correct—but I can also add that it was only a scrape on the surface.
Europe is going downhill. A wave of anti-democratic, anti-freedom laws, policies, and campaigns are rewriting the landscape of the continent where democracy and freedom were born.
This is nothing new per se—the Europeans not only invented the institutions of modern, Western civilization, but they also created Fascism, National Socialism, and Stalinism. It also ignited two World Wars in the last century. On the upside, its political leaders spent a good long time after 1945 trying to stamp out all forms of totalitarianism—and yet here we go again:
A 16-year-old was recently removed from her high school by police in Germany. Her crime? Reposting a pro-AfD video on TikTok involving the Smurfs (the populist-right wing party’s color is blue). A woman in the United Kingdom was detined for silently praying outside of an abortion clinic; the land of George Orwell has someone arrested for a literal thought crime.
It gets worse:
An Austrian woman was arrested for calling Muhammad, who married a nine-year-old girl, a paedophile. Another woman, this time in Germany, was fined €80,000 [$87,190] for making a Nazi salute. Again in Germany, an AfD politician was arrested and fined for claiming that migrants commit more gang rapes than German citizens do (the court did not dispute her facts, but said they incited hatred).
On February 3, a court in Stockholm, Sweden, sentenced a man for so-called “agitation against an ethnic or national group”. The court applied the Swedish “hate speech” laws, make it a crime to criticize any ethnic or national group—except for ethnic Swedes. You can de facto get sentenced for blasphemy against Islam, but not against Christianity.
Most of the attacks on individual freedom are taking place within the borders of the European Union. The Orwellian Digital Services Act from a few years ago, and by ominous rulings by the Court of “Justice” of the European Union, show that the crackdown on citizens’ freedom is not a spur of the moment. However, as Britain is demonstrating with its efforts to lead the anti-freedom crusade. leaving the EU is no guarantee that a country will protect even the most basic rights of its citizens.
The totalitarian ambitions of Europe’s political leadership are not limited to free speech. Back in January,
Thierry Breton, the European Union’s former internal market commissioner, admitted in a French TV interview … that the Romanian Constitutional Court (CCR) bowed to EU pressure. It annulled the country’s presidential elections last month, following the first-round victory of the Eurosceptic and anti-NATO, right-wing populist candidate, Călin Georgescu.
In other words, Bretton—who has also been referred to as the EU’s special “censorship czar” for his role in advancing encroachments on free speech—openly admits that the EU interfered with the domestic affairs of a member state to have an election result nullified. Why? Because the EU’s top brass did not like the outcome of the election.
The annulment of the election result was ordered by Romania’s supreme court, which—it might be worth mentioning—is a mixture of judges and politicians. It based its decision on allegations of “foreign interference” where foreign, of course, refers to Russia.
To date not a shred of evidence has been presented in support of the supreme court’s ruling.
After Thierry Breton admitted to the EU’s active, foreign interference in the Romanian election, he threatened that the EU would do the same to Germany if the national conservative party Alternative fur Deutschland, AfD, got too many votes.
Along the same line of contempt for conservatives and for the integrity of democratic elections, the EU has waged an administrative, judicial, and increasingly fiscal war on Hungary. For the past 15 years, the Fidesz party has governed Hungary based on a consistent but in not way radical conservative platform.
Given the unending hostility toward Hungary, you might think that the country’s prime minister Victor Orban has been restraining free speech and rigging or annulling elections. He has done none of that: all his government is ”guilty” of is promoting traditional families, protecting children from the LGBTetc movement, enforcing the nation’s immigration laws, keeping taxes moderate, and encouraging foreign direct investment.
The result is a safe, economically thriving, socially cohesive, and family friendly country, right there in the heart of Europe. The Hungarian election system—the integrity of which has been proven time and time again—is an intriguing combination of proportionate and simple-majority representation. Voters get not one, but two votes to cast, one for each part of the system.
Four elections in a row, the Hungarian people have elected conservatives who prioritize Hungary and the needs of the Hungarian people. For this, they have received repeated showers of scorn from Brussels, including a barrage of accusations that Hungary is a semi-totalitarian state.
The implication, of course, is that Hungary does not have free elections, and yet every single election since at least 2010 has been meticulously scrutinized by foreign election observers. Not a single one of them has come up with any evidence of interference or wrongdoing by the government.
This is unsurprising, but it is also a point that leads us directly back to what former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton said about the Romanian and German elections. In the view of the European Union, the democratic nature of an election is not determined by the form under which the election takes place. It has nothing to do with the secrecy of the ballot, the equal right of every citizen to vote, or the government’s respect for the election outcome. The democratic nature of an election is determined entirely by what opinions the winning parties hold.
If those opinions are conservative, the election was undemocratic.
The European Union has now reached the point where it actively tries to prohibit election outcomes that it ideologically disagrees with. This means that elections where the EU engages in foreign interference—as Breton explained happened in Romania—are about as democratic as elections in Russia.
Add the growing crackdown on free speech, and the comparison to Russia becomes even more compelling. Throw into the mix the blatantly political prosecution of Marine Le Pen in France, which has eerie similarities to the prosecutions of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny—and the difference between the European Union and the Russian Federation boils down to a matter of time.
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