Unworthy of ourselves

Does anyone want to be described as European anymore? Let’s hope that anyone with an ounce of humanism would wish otherwise. Those currently in power on this continent wouldn’t even obtain asylum amidst the dregs of humanity.

With regard to the Finns, we can be brief: quite obviously they are still walking around with bearskins on their backs. Sit them up on a sleigh, and off they go in all directions. Civilisation stops at the snow line - such is the charm of folklore.

The Hungarians are even less innocent - they are an evil people, even. Parliament has adopted a new constitution stipulating that God and Christianity have united the Hungarian nation. Where the fuck do the Muslims and atheists fit in? It has been a while since we have seen a constitution so heavily imbued with discrimination. Even more impertinent: it says children should be born to marriages between men and women. So goodbye to gays, goodbye to unmarried mothers. And to crown it all with a final medieval flourish: the foetus must be protected from the moment of conception.

Right under our noses, in Europe in the year 2011, Hungarian women have been instructed to revive the practice of making angels with knitting needles. And when you think that they didn’t have to burn anyone at the stake to do this! But it’s true that in Europe, everything is possible. Principles are out of fashion and the market is the ultimate charter — not that it is much of a help in resolving ethical dilemmas...

But what is Herman Van Rompuy going to do? Is he simply going to hold open the door for this institutional trash? And if he is, will he mind being the president of poisonous warts? Penning a few haikus will not be enough to console him from such depravity.

Europe is a chronicle of scandals. In the Netherlands, we have a bigot holding the government to ransom with impunity. In Rome, a superannuated sex offender who is guided by his tricoloured cock. And in the Elysee, an excuse for a president who thinks he's a Ferrari. “When you open the hood, you do it with white gloves” [a remark attributed to Nicolas Sarkozy in La Conquête, a film about his rise to power to be released in May]. A spiv could not have put it better. President? An idiot, rather.

Last but not least, we have Belgium: an educational farm where knickers flap in the wind on a populist washing line. Europe, a splendid state of mind that has become a tumour.