IT WAS appropriate that Vice President JD Vance executed his ambush of the Munich ‘security conference’ on the 96th anniversary of the Valentine’s Day Massacre. The new Veep’s version was, all things considered, a pretty gentle tribute to Al Capone’s original, which is great as it means that there are survivors who will continue to feel its stinging reproach. Quite possibly for ever.
Schadenfreude, in case we needed reminding, is a German word.
Yes, I know, it is not recommended intellectual practice to grade a speech by looking at who was offended by it, but the anthropology is remarkable. The Zil lane Eurocommissars and their pet media outriders were forced to sit, open mouthed, as Vance spoon-fed them a three-course meal consisting of their own locally produced confusions, hypocrisies and tyrannical excesses.
By the end some of the prisoners looked a touch bilious, possibly because they were allowed only 20 minutes to eat it all up before being granted permission to leave the table. Sorry, conference room.
Setting aside the aesthetics, Vance’s argument was compelling. It is not coherent for the Brussels perma- government to fret performatively about threats to freedom over there (where ‘there’, currently, is the Ukraine) while dismantling it here; and you cannot argue the case for European defence, at least not persuasively, if you are unclear what that defence is for.
The Eurocrat class is in love with democracy and freedom in the abstract but treats them as optional and disposable in the particular. Its philanthropy is of the Bleak House, telescopic stripe, and its humanitarianism is of the shouty genre, the one that grates on the ears of functioning human beings.
‘The threat [to European security] that I worry about’, he said, ‘does not come from Russia or China . . . it comes from within.’
The Vice President ‘brought receipts’, taking his audience on a European tour of itemised despotism, in which the United Kingdom, with its war on silent prayer, featured prominently.
In the days following this dressing-down, those offended by all this truth have chosen to confirm the case against themselves via recourse toever more legalistic and pretzel-shaped Jesuitical contortions.
This Pavlovian recourse to legalese was to be expected. Western political actors have a dysfunctional relationship with the law. For them it is something which does not emerge naturally from human interaction but is a mechanism of coercion, emanating from top downwards, intended to steer those interactions in the direction of a political end. And people who internalise legalese and come to valorise the language of the EU acquis over that of Shakespeare, thereby deprive themselves of the resources of imagination necessary to think in any other way.
In the specific case of the UK, Vance is quite correct. It is inevitable that a piece of legislation will contain ambiguities because ambiguity is an embedded feature of both language and thought. But here, they are used to activate the judicial process in service of enforced conformity, as in the disgusting cases of Adam Smith-Connor and Isobel Vaughan-Spruce.
The Vice President was also right to point out the (logical) absurdity of exporting security to Ukraine while importing its opposite to the European continent. You don’t even need to ‘draw the dots’ to see that the experiment in mass immigration, however benign and noble in conception, has had slow-motion but real-time security implications. That picture isn’t ‘hidden in plain sight’; it’s just in plain sight.
The US is blessed to have a new Vice President who understands that the wisdom of a country is distributed across conversations going on between all its citizens, not just those who have the correct opinions. There is as much, if not more, truth spoken over the fourth pint than at even the most Guardian-approved international gathering of the Davos set.
Mr Vance pointed out that the right to free speech is a necessary condition of national security and when governments, in collusion with social media companies, act against one they undermine the other. Almost casually, he pointed out how the Sovietisation of ordinary ways of speaking has enabled the biggest scandal in history, when the truth about covid – that it escaped from a ‘gain of function’ viral laboratory in China – was written off as ‘misinformation’, a word which should not be used unironically by anybody who wishes no harm on the English language.
That this part of his lecture (for such it was) went largely unremarked attests to just how extraordinary the whole thing was.
The US political commentator, Mark Halperin, has commented that JD Vance ‘talks the language of MAGA in the accent of suburban America’. This seems fair. This Veep has a sensitivity to the rhythms of not-Washington and has now revealed a genius for translating those into the idiom of diplomatic insult.
This was a great speech in terms of craft and delivery. But also, in terms of reception. The Establishment tumbleweed and desultory applause made for beautiful aesthetics. The typical European security summit looks like a nightmare convention of Dickens’s most insufferable characters, at which the soulless Mr Gradgrind sits alongside the morally myopic Mrs Jellyby, as they assure each other of the rightness of their shared worldview.
So be sure to watch what fans of Deadpool would call the ‘post-credits’ clips. These have included a reply from the conference host, Christoph Heugsen, which devolved into what my grandmother would have called a fit of the vapours. Yes, you got that, the chairman of a gathering about security reacted to some hurty words by weeping in front of millions of people.
Even now Putin must be wargaming his response to any future European pushback and wondering how to repel those crack teams of lanyard-weaving DEI hires. We are led not by serious people.
To sum up, this speech was astonishing. Mr Vance elbowed aside the normal evangelists for EU consolidation and spoke truth to the entitled and complacent. They replied by tearing up.
It might also turn out to be a moment in history, a ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ event. But that rather depends on us. Yes, the current madness and ever more acute state overreach is Orwellian. But we need to remember that in 1984, it was the complicity of the Winston Smiths that kept Big Brother in a job. We all need to step up.
Yes, we want our freedom. But the Vice President is also asking us: what do we want it for?
Here is JD Vance’s powerful speech in full which deserves watching for its delivery as much as for the stony silence that greeted it.
