“European Values”: The Strange Case of Colonel Jacques Baud

“War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength.” - Winston Smith, 1984

“Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works. It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity, and social cohesion that humankind has been able to build. The rest of the world is not exactly a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden.

A nice small garden surrounded by high walls to prevent the jungle from coming in is not a solution … the jungle has a strong growth capacity. The gardeners have to go to the jungle. Europeans have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us, in different ways and means.” - Josep Borrell (then EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. No one told us what school of diplomacy Mr Borrell attended, but it must rhyme with his name in Dutch.

Modesty is undoubtedly not the forte of uneducated, uncultured, self-regarding, and self-worshiping European officials.

For over four decades, I have told whoever would listen that one of the most nauseating things I found about Europe is the barefaced hypocrisy. What I saw in Europe when I studied there is a culture where people do not consider words as sacred. This makes it possible for Europeans to see nothing wrong in divorcing themselves from their rhetoric. Dr Cressing expanded on this peculiar European trait in a chapter, The Rhetorical Function of Christian Ethics, of her book, The ISIS Paper.

Thus, Europeans can go around the world and massacre indigenous people on an industrial scale, and they will not see any contradiction in their proclamation of universal love. It is what made it possible for European to tell the victims of their crime to forgive and turn the other cheek, something that they would never do. And where in the wide world do we find Europeans forgiving people who transgress against them as their Lord’s Prayer teaches?

We have European scholars and NGOists trampling around Africa, purported to be teaching democracy, human rights, blah blah blah, even as these items disappear from Europe.

Unfortunately, many Africans would never listen when we try to tell them these things. To these colonized and brain-dirtied Africans, Europe is the paragon of virtues that can do no wrong. No matter the evidence presented, nothing would move these zombie West-worshippers.

It gives little joy to crow: I was right, especially when it came at the expense of human tragedy.

We will never know what malignant spirit seized Europe’s much-vaunted Enlightenment, hollowed it out, and refashioned it into an instrument of bureaucratic tyranny, but it reared its ugly head again a few weeks ago, when unelected Eurocrats sanctioned one of Europe’s best-known public intellectuals, Colonel Jacques Baud.

What baffled the most was that the sanctions imposed were neither about law nor about justice. It was about power, unaccountable raw political power, wielded by unelected Brusselian Braniacs who mistaken obedience for virtue and stupid propaganda for truth.

Authoritarian EU officials just announced that the Colonel’s bank accounts have been frozen, his travel within the EU has been restricted, and other measures have been taken against him.

To those of us who follow him, Colonel Jacques Baud is no revolutionary by any stretch of the imagination. He is a retired Swiss intelligence officer, an ultra-disciplined analyst, trained not to emote but to think. The Colonel and Mr Andrei Martyanov are my GoTo military analysts. They have seldom been wrong in their analyses.

Unfortunately, the astute colonel committed the gravest sin in today’s Europe: he developed and kept a mind of his own, and he refused to clap on cue like most brainwashed Europeans. Unlike Western MNS, Colonel Baud examined the official catechism on Ukraine and, with the calm precision of a professional, declared it analytically dishonest.

For this thought crime, he has been sanctioned. There were no charges pressed, no court sat and tried him. He was not convicted of a crime. Yet, the EU, that outpost of a decaying empire that still has the indecency to call itself democratic, sanctioned him. His native Switzerland is not raising a finger to help him.

Sanctions that were once reserved for hostile states, warlords, and arms traffickers are now deployed against a lone intellectual whose only weapon is inconvenient logic. EU bureaucrats have criminalized analysis. It was not a thing even inventive George Orwell’s mind could have invented!

And let no apologist insult our intelligence by pretending this was an aberration. No, it was not. It has become a policy. This is the trajectory and the logical conclusion of a system that long ago replaced debate with dogma and law with loyalty tests. We did our best to ring the alarm bell that the EU was turning Europe into an Orwellian nightmare, but no one listened. Instead, we were called names, none of them palatable.

We said the jackboots would not announce themselves with marching songs à la 1984. They would arrive softly, wrapped in legal jargon, wielded by smiling technocrats who have never won an election yet presume the authority to determine what may be thought.

Now the mask has slipped. Welcome to the new Europe, where the truth is not debated but sanctioned.

Baud’s “offense” is unforgivable precisely because it is devastatingly simple. Like Alastair Crooke and other heretics of reason, he insists on treating the Ukraine war not as a Marvel movie populated by saints and demons, but as a geopolitical struggle over power, security, and a collapsing unipolar order. He points to the sabotaged peace talks. He points to seven years of Western contempt for the Minsk agreements, as Frau Merkel recounted in her biography. He points to NATO’s studied refusal to acknowledge Russia’s security concerns. These are not Kremlin talking points; they are documented facts. But facts are lethal to a regime that has wagered its legitimacy on a fairy tale.

To concede even a fraction of Baud’s analysis would be to admit that Europe is not defending democracy, but immolating itself in a proxy war designed in Washington and paid for by European workers. It would mean confessing that energy poverty, deindustrialization, and the social decay that is now impossible to miss in Europe are not accidents, but the price of imperial obedience.

Colonel Baud must be punished, not because he is wrong, but because he might be right.

As we observe the tragic farce of the European masses, we can only imagine what chemical sedative has been poured into their water to create such a sheepish populace as we see in Europe. Europeans celebrate themselves as the last guardians of freedom, but we see their police arrest citizens for opposing genocide, while banks freeze accounts for wrongthink, and stenographers masquerading as journalists read from scripts prepared by the state.

Europeans cheered when these tools of authoritarian control were tested on Russians. They applauded when dissenters were deplatformed, censored, and financially strangled, so long as it was done to the “other.”

Martin Niemöller warned us:
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

It was said that those who refuse to learn from history will repeat its tragic mistakes. Now the machinery turns inward. The same authoritarian instruments, sharpened and deployed abroad, are deployed at home.

Tragically, the Baud affair is the system devouring its own children.

As we often warn, we in Africa must pay particular attention to geopolitical affairs. If only to understand what peril awaits us if we fail to acquire the knowledge necessary to navigate the shark-infested waters of the emerging world order.

To those among us still hypnotized by Western validation, still genuflecting before European “values,” still importing NGOs and consultants as if wisdom were packaged in Brussels: wake up. The same people sanctioning a man for thinking are the ones who arrive on our shores to lecture us about free speech. The same hands that strangle dissent in Europe continue to write governance manuals for us in Africa.

For us in Africa, Europe should no longer be considered as a model but as a warning. A civilization that punishes thought has already signed its own death certificate.

Our plea is that Africa must begin an urgent, strategic disengagement from this decaying order, from its NGOs, its academics, its “experts,” and its moral blackmail.

Let us end this piece with a lengthy quotation from Frantz Fanon, a visionary who should need no introduction to any educated African: “Come, comrades, the European game is finally over; we must look for something else. We can do anything today, provided we do not ape Europe, provided we are not obsessed with catching up with Europe.

Europe has gained such a mad and reckless momentum that it has lost control and reason and is heading at dizzying speed towards the brink from which we would be advised to remove ourselves as quickly as possible.

It is, however, all too true that we need a model, schemata, and examples. For many of us, the European model is the most elating. But we have seen in the preceding pages how misleading such an imitation can be. European achievements, European technology, and European lifeclasss must stop tempting us and leading us astray.

When I look for man in European lifeclasss and technology, I see a constant denial of man, an avalanche of murders.

Let us decide not to imitate Europe, and let us tense our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us endeavor to invent a man in full, something which Europe has been incapable of achieving.

Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It has been so successful that the United States of America has become a monster where the flaws, sickness, and inhumanity of Europe have reached frightening proportions.

Comrades, have we nothing else to do but create a third Europe? The West saw itself on a spiritual adventure. It is in the name of the Spirit, meaning the spirit of Europe, that Europe justified its crimes and legitimized the slavery in which it held four-fifths of humanity.

So comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions, and societies that draw their inspiration from it.

Humanity expects other things from us than this grotesque and generally obscene emulation.

For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavour to create a new man.” - Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.

©️ Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀‌làfẹ̀ (1st Dan)

(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Satirist, Social Commentator, Polemicist-General of the Pan-African Republic)

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