The face of hypocrisy in all its glory

IRINA SLAV

I was planning to shred some recent reports about fun stuff like green job subsidies and keeping oil in the ground but last night I finally got to watch a game from Euro 24 and my plan changed.

The reason it changed was that in that game, or rather, the advertising around the pitch, the face of hypocrisy showed itself in all its glory. Now, you might argue that we see that face on a daily basis in every Euractiv report, in every “Europe” section news story on Reuters and other corporate media, but I guess that those ads around the pitch were the last straw.

So, as I watched ten German citizens of foreign descent in rather odd purple shirts chase ten Hungarians back and forth, I couldn’t help but notice most of the ads were for companies such as Hisense, Aliexpress, Alicom, BYD, Vivo and some digital wallet or something that Google told me was an Alibaba business.

Five of the thirteen Euro 24 official sponsors, in other words, are Chinese companies. Five Chinese companies are sponsoring a sports event on a continent whose supranational government is trying to wage a trade war on Beijing — notably in electric cars where BYD is the leader.

Money talks you’d say and you’d be perfectly right. It was also money that talked when Russian natural gas imports into Europe topped U.S. imports, all while European so-called leaders continued with their verbal diarrhoea about weaning the EU off Russian gas and how they’re totally going to ban all Russian gas imports because there’s so much friendly gas from the U.S., Qatar, Azerbaijan, and Norway. Yes, money talks and the EU, the face of hypocrisy, pretends it doesn’t.

By the way, the above news was brought to all of us graciously by the Financial Times — the same publication that in April proudly reported How Europe solved its Russian gas problem. Apparently, the solution to the Russian gas problem was to import more of that same gas. An ingenious solution, no doubt, and not at all hypocritical.

The face of hypocrisy also happily imports massive amounts of used cooking oil from Guess Where because its own production is nowhere near enough to satisfy demand from the air transport industry, which has been forced to blend growing amounts of so-called sustainable aviation fuel to its normal fuel because emissions.

It was climate NGO Transport & Environment that sounded the alarm this week in a report warning that China, the world’s biggest source of used cooking oil that’s the standard feedstock for SAFs, is about to run out due to soaring demand from Europe and the U.S. A day later the boss of Frankfurt Airport twisted the knife in the wound saying “There is not enough sustainable fuel to meet the quotas.” I guess we should all get frying.

Meanwhile, Brussels will get boiling because China has fired the first retaliatory shot after Miss Hypocrisy’s brilliant EV tariff move. Beijing is launching an anti-dumping investigation into imports of European pork and pork byproducts but Brussels is “not worried”, which is a blatant lie, possibly triggered by the embarrassment inherent in the potential realisation that by attacking China’s EV industry you’ve left your food industry vulnerable. And it’s your only industry that’s running a trade surplus with China.

Meanwhile, the EU’s very own Council of Europe finally acknowledged something a lot of us regular Europeans have been seeing with their own eyes and that yet again reveals the EU as the hypocritical and racist — yes, racist — puddle of organic fertiliser that it is. The Council of Europe found that white Ukrainian refugees received better treatment in the EU than non-White refugees from the country — and from other countries.

And to think that witness reports from Bulgaria that Ukrainians were getting multiple-star hotel treatment on the seaside (paid for by Bulgaria and the EU) while other refugees are kept in not at all hotel-like refugee centres and Bulgarian citizens who lost their homes in a flood were accommodated in portable rooms — and spent a year in them — were dismissed as Russian propaganda because literally — and I mean that literally — every inconvenient fact in Europe these days is being dismissed as Russian propaganda.

Hypocrisy is truly charming and this selective treatment of refugees may be its most charming manifestation yet. Because this selective treatment is being done by the very same governments that are so very strongly in favour of more immigration. It makes one suspect they have zero idea what they are doing at any given point in time.

One Council of Europe official even had the guts or the lapse in self-control to state an evolutionary fact. Asked whether the better treatment Ukrainians received was because of their skin colour, the chair of the Council’s anti-racism commission said the following: “When people are more or less like you, it's always easier.”

Well, that’s all right, then. Europeans are absolutely not racist but they would treat a white Ukrainian family better than an Iraqi family because the former are “more or less like them” and the latter are a different colour. I honestly had a bit of a hard time believing he actually said that. Yet he did. The Council of that same Europe that designed the open arms immigration policy that made national governments and their court jester media tone down every report of immigrant violence on locals and amplify every incident of violence in the other direction. Hypocrisy is glorious.

It’s getting even better, however. The EU is currently discussing what it calls upload moderation for digital messages. The censorship push is dressed in the noble goal of preventing child sexual abuse online because of course it must be. But what it amounts to, is the EU reading all of our messages and essentially making encryption meaningless —or privacy. It’s okay, though. We can refuse to have our chats scanned. We just won’t be able to share links and pictures. For now, that is. Because the EU is as big on freedom of speech as it is on equality and non-racism.

Source: Irina Slav on Energy