Before we get to Sir Keir's "peace summit", let us consider the far more relevant news from Paris.
How relevant?
Well, it's the entire history of the contemporary western world in a single news story. And, for those who regretted there weren't more Daryl Hannah moments at last night's Oscars, we hope this makes up. Poets, said Shelley, are "the unacknowledged legislators of the world". So what happens when poets - or at any rate arts administrators - get to make actual policy? Long-ish headline from The Daily Mail:
Left-wing theatre managers who invited 200 migrants to a free show will abandon the building and face bankruptcy as refugees still refuse to leave after three months and spark wave of sex-related violence
And, as it goes for the beautiful Gaîté-Lyrique in Paris, so it will go for France, Germany, the Netherlands, the British Isles, Scandinavia, Your Country Here:
Some 200 mainly young men moved in last December when the management gave them free tickets to a 'Refugees Welcome in France' conference.
Granted, that's a bit too perfect. Had Jean Raspail opened The Camp of the Saints with that, his publisher would have told him to go home and come up with something subtler.
But when the conference was finished, the migrants, who mostly come from France's former west African colonies, refused to leave the venue.
Performances were soon cancelled – losing the theatre thousands in revenue – as makeshift beds were placed around the stage and auditorium.
With no performances to see other than sexual assaults, neighbouring bistros and brasseries have also lost all their business. So the company is now abandoning the property - which, under French law, will undoubtedly get them sued and probably prosecuted. But what to do? They're hopelessly outnumbered:
There are now 446 people living inside illegally, most of them claiming they are minors under the age of 18 who deserve permanent housing.
But local officials have insisted that they are adults...
The Collectif des Jeunes du Parc de Belleville, the group which organised the occupation, slammed the age test as 'racist...'
So age is racist. Useful to know if you're an octogenarian seeking employment as a pole dancer. This all rang a vague bell with me from years ago:
As I think I've mentioned, a couple of summers back in Reutlingen [in southern Germany] I fell in with some purported 'teenage Syrian refugees' (actually thirty-year-old Gambian non-refugees) and did a bit of translating for them with the local townsfolk.
Amiable fellows. They thought it funny when I referred to Banjul as "Bathurst" and made jokes about Sir Dawda Jawara, who was briefly deposed while he was in London attending the wedding of the then Prince of Wales to Lady Diana Spencer. I did, though, find all the taxpayer-funded marijuana a bit too heady:
Last year I spent a few days in the German town of Reutlingen, in a refugee house with some affable Gambian men not quite as young as they were pretending to be nor as North African as they were claiming, but perfectly upfront and amiable about their gaming of the system. I found them agreeable company, although the amount of pot they smoked gave me a bit of a headache in the confines of their rooms.
As I discovered in Germany, France, Scandinavia, all over western Europe, the age racism is a vital element of "their gaming of the system". Because the law is different for minors. A year after meeting those Gambians, I put a thirty-year-old "refugee" in our Christmas tale Plum Duff. Because every refugee I had spoken to said with a straight face that he was sixteen or seventeen even as the ravages of early middle-age creased his forehead and bagged his eyes. The Gambian lads, after claiming that they were teenagers, at least had the decency to be overcome by a fit of the giggles.
Perhaps the Parisian "refugees" could meet the luvvies halfway and agree to a gala performance of The Sound of Music: "We are sixteen going on seventeen..."
As they say in Gypsy, how long has that been going on?
What I find odd is that, if a "niche Canadian" (per The Guardian) figured all this out a decade ago, how come all these in-situ Parisian theatricals didn't foresee how this would wind up? As someone said long ago, the future belongs to those who show up - and at the Gaîté-Lyrique the future of the western world has shown up and settled in.
Mildly amusing aside from the Mail's report:
It called for the government to deal with the problem, but President Emmanuel Macron's centrist cabinet is said to have ignored the request and is reluctant to get involved in the debacle.
So M Macron boarded his flight and jetted off to London for the next debacle.
~Thought for the day: Is the Trump/Zelenskyyyy "spat" just about Ukraine? Or will Saint Volodymyr the Suitless take the entire Atlantic alliance down with him?
Within minutes of Z being booted from the White House, "the world" (ie, western Europe and Canada) indicated that it stood shoulder to shoulder with St Vlod and always would. Remember March 2022 when Nancy Pelosi serenaded Congress with Bono's poem to Zelensky?
I doubt even Bono would write that today. Because it all seems like a long time ago to some of us. But not in London and Brussels, Paris and Berlin, where it's March 2022 now and forever.
St Patrick, as Bono noted, drove the snakes out of Ireland. Ukraine is full of snakes - Boris Johnson, Victoria Nuland, Lindsey Graham - and St Vlod shows no inclination to drive any of them out. The only concrete proposals emerging from Keir Starmer's Euro-Canadian "peace" summit are provisions for more war. Sir Keir is giving Kiev another £1.6 billion to enable the Ukrainians to buy 5,000 "lightweight multirole missiles" that will be "made in Belfast, creating jobs in our brilliant defence sector".
Great. That would appear to satisfy the leftie peaceniks ...sorry, leftie warniks outside Lancaster House [see picture at top right] stamping their feet and insisting this war is so not over. As Viktor Orbán put it, "European leaders decided in London today that they want to go on with the war." Just to complete the strange inversion of roles, Starmer chose to characterise the new Anglo-French-led alliance by exhuming a phrase not heard since George W Bush over twenty years ago:
Starmer announces 'coalition of the willing' to guarantee Ukraine peace
Crikey. Has he ordered up the "Mission Accomplished" banner for HMS Zelensky yet?
UPDATE! From Wanda in our comments section:
Since antique phrases like 'coalition of the willing' are once again in fashion, maybe Trump should have asserted that he was proposing a 'bombing pause for Ramadan' to get the warniks behind him.
Ah, those were the days!
To be clear about it, any old rinky-dink basket-case can make war, if it just wants to sell Ulster rocketry for a few more years. But making peace falls within the purview of a far more select group - because it requires hard-power concepts such as leverage. So Sir Keir is offering to out-Neville Chamberlain: "Peace in our time! With 'security guarantees' to be worked out a decade hence!"
What we do know is that whatever "peace", if any, emerges from Starmer's ambitious if woozily unfocused weekend pronouncements will be far worse for Ukraine (certainly in terms of lost territory) than the deal on the table three years ago in Istanbul - until Johnson flew into Kiev and told Z, "Don't even think about it."
So a lot of Ukrainians will have died ...for what? The official rationale is that, once Putin had taken Donetsk and Kiev, he would ride on through the old Warsaw Pact and eventually steamroller Berlin and Paris. And then even further west: as Zelensky warned Trump and Vance on Friday, "You will feel it in the future."
"Don't tell us what we're going to feel," responded Trump, quite correctly. Whatever the real reasons for US involvement in Ukraine, it's not because Russia (absent all-out nuclear Armageddon) is an existential threat to America. The European Union, which now borders Russia, presumably feels differently. Putin's tanks on the autobahn and all that.
Well, maybe. But they don't act as if they feel differently. And, as a general rule, actions are a more reliable guide to how you really feel than rhetoric. Tweeting a group photograph from Sir Keir's Euro-summit, Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, declared: "Europa się obudziła." Which means: "Europe has woken up."
Seriously? So three years of non-stop carpet bombing right next door didn't wake you up? Nato's Secretary-General, the execrable Dutch hack Mark Rutte, said confidently that "more European countries will ramp up defence spending". "We really have to step up massively," announced so-called Euro-president Cruella von der Leyen.
Posterity's defence of Neville Chamberlain is that Munich bought necessary time for Britain to "ramp up" (as no one said back then) war production. But, three years after Mariupol was reduced to rubble, Europe is only now starting to think about "stepping up massively"? Gee, it's almost like a third-of-a-decade of Putin's bombs doesn't alarm them as much as that ten-minute speech by JD Vance the other week.
As I have written, everything the Government of the United States touches turns into a racket - and that certainly includes the "Atlantic Alliance", which for most of the so-called "allies" is the Free World as free lunch. If you think the racket should be kept going, you'd be keeping at the very minimum a cautious distance from Zelensky - or even going full Lindsey Graham, recipient of the Order of Prince Yaroslav the Wise but now demanding Z's departure. Instead, the Euro-Canadians decided to hold a Nato summit without America but with Zelensky in the Yank chair at the top table. The world's most ostentatious monger of all-war-all-the-time was not impressed:
To the hand-wringing Europeans who felt offended by President Trump rejecting being lectured by President Zelensky: Be my guest to defend Ukraine from Putin.
It is long past time for the Europeans to show they are capable of defending their own continent.
They've allowed...
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) March 1, 2025
For three-quarters of a century, the west's "security guarantee" has been the Second World War victory parade preserved in aspic. By siding with Zelensky over Trump, the "allies" are signalling that they're willing to do to the forty-seventh president what the Deep State did to the forty-fifth. That's unlikely to work out well for them.
~Another thought: Ukraine began this war as the most corrupt country in Europe (or the second, if you regard Russia as wholly within Europe, which it isn't). In March 2022, when I walked into Ukraine from Hungary (because my Budapest rental car had had its computer programmed to kill the ignition at the border), you didn't really need a formal frontier post to let you know where the European Union ended and the Ukraine began. The pavement died instantly, crumbling into a minefield of potholes with tiny strips of perfunctory asphalt in between. This was not some obscure back-road but the principal crossing between Ukraine and a major western neighbour. Whittaker, my cameraman, said it reminded him of his last visit to Africa. As the lady who drove us into town said breezily, money had been allocated for the road to the border but siphoned off en route.
So one way to think of Ukraine is whether the war and the western largesse showered on Zelensky is making "the most corrupt country in Europe" more or less corrupt? Whatever devastation the Russian meat grinder has inflicted on eastern Ukraine, Zelensky has profoundly weakened the country's already fragile institutions in the west. It was clear early on that the war would cover an awful lot of score-settling: A man called Dmytro Shtanko had provided credible evidence of corruption by the brother of Zelinsky's chief of staff, Andriy Yermak. When war began, Mr Shtanko was called up as an infantryman into the 93rd Separate Mechanised Brigade and shipped to the front in Bakhmut (just north of Donetsk), where he was killed in action.
As I have often said, because I'm extremely shallow, I love the Ukrainian blondes with the dark Slavic unibrows, but, beyond that, it is not a country that can withstand any closer examination than Daryl Hannah's "Slava Ukraini!" The Yermak brothers were not sent to the front and are still in Kiev, living large. And there are more roads full of holes.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with my column on the feds' non-disclosure of their Jeffrey Epstein materials. Saturday brought an instant reaction to the Trump-Zelenskyyyy ructions, while Rick McGinnis's movie date offered Greer Garson in Mrs Miniver. My weekly music show celebrated Bizet's Carmen and a cavalcade of Oscar-winning songs, and our Sunday Song of the Week selection was the very first Academy Award-winner. The SteynOnline marquee presentation was a chilly Tale for Our Time and one of the greatest short stories ever written - Jack London's To Build a Fire. Click here for Part One and here for the conclusion.
If you were too busy this weekend hosting a summit for Volodymyr Zelenskyyyy, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
~In this eighth year of The Mark Steyn Club, we're very appreciative of all those who signed up in our first flush and are still eager to be here as we cruise on towards our first decade. We're thrilled by all those across the globe - from Fargo to Fiji, Vancouver to Vanuatu, Surrey to the Solomon Islands - who've signed up to be a part of it. We have quite a bit of fun in The Mark Steyn Club, with audio adventures, video poems, planet-wide Q&As, and much more (heart attacks permitting). We appreciate the Club is not to everyone's taste, but, if you're minded to give it a go, either for a full year or a three-month experimental period, we'd love to have you. You can find more details on The Mark Steyn Club here - and, if you've a loved one who'd like something a little different for his or her birthday, don't forget our special Gift Membership.
