Europe decided to assassinate culture precisely because culture turns a profit. It’s the only possible explanation. Official reports say the creative industry yields eleven euros for every euro invested. What an absolute scandal. In Brussels, a profitable business involving books and records is a personal offence. The European bureaucrat prefers to subsidise beetroots.
Let’s take a look at these boys’ language. EU’s 2028-2034 budget is a marvel of plastic prose. The European Union wants to force competitiveness upon us with a hammer. They invented a “European Competitiveness Fund”. It holds 234 billion euros. Almost enough money to buy the planet and carpet it. They divided the fortune into four “policy windows”. What the hell is a policy window? Nobody knows. But it serves wonderfully to throw money away.
There is money for the “Clean Transition”. There is money for “Digital Leadership”. There is a lot of money for “Defence and Space”. But they cut funding for the creative industries. They withdrew bank guarantees from independent publishers, musicians, and theatres. The reasoning is impeccable. You want to open a bookstore. You go to the bank to ask for a loan. The bank laughs in your face. Europe laughs, too. They tell you to apply to a program called “AgoraEU”, which sounds like a yoghurt brand designed to aid with bowel transit.
The problem with Europeans is the disease of metrics. They love to measure “innovation” and “resilience”. Culture is not resilient. Culture is our fragility laid bare. For Brussels, innovation is strictly technological. To innovate means creating a smartphone app for ordering junk food delivered by bicycle. Researching the bankruptcy of the human heart does not count. They removed culture from the scientific research program. They decided that melancholy does not deserve scholarships. It is a brutal mistake. European sadness is our most sophisticated invention.
They think culture is a luxury for idle people. A slice of cake to eat on a Sunday afternoon. They are wrong. Culture is the only thing that stops you from putting a bullet in your head on a rainy Tuesday.
The panic of these elites is American technology. They want to fight the blind hegemony of Silicon Valley. The strategy they invented is formidable: to silence their own European creators. We will defeat American platforms with our deafening silence. A very expensive silence, duly regulated and approved by committee. They want technological sovereignty, but they forget the machine has no ideas. Fibre optics merely transmits human misery at a higher speed.
They spend fortunes preparing our military defence. They want to protect the continent. To save what?
The continent will age in peace. We will be an armoured fortress against chaos. Each citizen will have a lithium battery strapped to the chest and a solar panel bolted to the roof. We will be clean, ecological, and perfectly useless. Without a song to listen to while we watch the rain falling outside. Without a book to save our lives at three in the morning. Love will continue to be as shity as always, intractable and fatal, but no one will have the right words to describe it anymore. We will die in a five-star hospital room, bursting with health. And thoroughly alone.