Prime Minister Robert Fico was hit by four bullet rounds from close quarters in an attempted assassination last week. After five hours of surgery, Fico is said no longer to be in life-threatening condition, but his condition is said to be serious. 

The police reportedly have charged a 71 year old poet and writer with attempted murder (an unusual profile for a ‘lone wolf’ attacker).

“At the press conference after the attack”  Politico reports, “Šutaj Eštok, the interior minister, called for an end to the violent language and attacks on social media that have come to define Slovak politics in the Fico era. “I want to appeal to the public, to journalists, and to all politicians to stop spreading hatred”, he said. 

“We are on the verge of civil war.”

One MP from Fico’s Party shouted at the opposition in parliament that Fico “is fighting for his life today because of your hatred.”  Whilst Deputy Speaker Andrej Danko, head of the far-right Slovak National Party, demanded of the opposition: “Are you satisfied?”

Slovakia is deeply polarised: There is, on one side, a strongly pro-EU faction, who have scorned particularly the long-serving PM’s opposition to the West’s Ukraine policy (Fico has been Premier for 11 out of the last 18 years).

The reaction to the attempted assassination in parts of Europe largely however has shown scant sympathy, and in several instances has veered close to the edge of exculpatory. Though, even amongst this current, it is admitted that the campaign against Fico has been ‘toxic’.  He was accused of being pro-Russian, pro-Putin and obstructing support for Ukraine. 

Support for Ukraine has become in Europe the essential entry price to any conversation in Brussels -- It is the entry-price too, to doing any politics in the EU, as Orbán and Meloni have learned.

Finland’s President is but one example of he who follows the mandatory ‘line’: “Ukraine must win this war … no matter what”. “It is facing a huge aggressor, which is violating all rules of war”.

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Of course, the rational response is, ‘So?’ Does the Finnish President seriously propose that Europe mobilises in order to attack Russia?  Does His Excellency not notice that Ukraine is out-matched by Russia, and that NATO has been out-matched too?  That Ukraine can’t ‘win’?

Should then the Presidential outburst be seen as just ‘narrative’: i.e. as nothing to be taken seriously?  For there is no way that the EU can even contemplate war with Russia.  The proposition is absurd.

That is true -- but nonetheless the language of Europe’s Ruling Strata today is riddled with a fervour for militarism and war (‘prepare for conscription’; move to ‘a defence-security orientated geo-political EU’, etc.).  It is not rational, but rather resembles a mass psychosis affecting the élite class, who are becoming desperate that their ‘Geo-political Europe’ project is unravelling; and that their errors of political and economic judgement are becoming obvious as Europe slides towards an all-too-predictable social and economic crisis.

It is not at all ‘rational’, but these élites understand that Putin and Russia can be used as cypher for the autocratic dark ‘other’ in the (Leo) Straussian conception -- that ‘the enemy’ in a specially intense way is someone different and alien, so that conflicts with ‘him’ are possible, even mandatory (by the nature of who he is).  

More than that,  the very dynamic first of recognition and then destruction of the adversary becomes a crucial component of national identity, or in this case, the EU transnational ‘state’ identity: ‘Democracy fighting autocrats’.

This formulation of an existential enemy so evil and alien implies that communication and relations should be regarded as unimaginable. Even to listen to the other side would be to cross the frontier of acceptable civic behaviour. The ‘Putin/Xi are dictators’ meme is crafted precisely to shut down free speech here in the West. 

It is intended to scare off critics of the élite and legitimises punishment for those ‘consorting’ with the enemy. In Europe, Russia is the principal hate-object; in the US anti-semitism stands in its stead, with Russian, China and Iran threaded on the same yarn as sharing a common malignity along an axis of evil.

The bottom line to this approach is one that tends to massive over-investment in a single authorised narrative, and when it falls apart (as now), there is 'no exit'.  Doubling down is the only option (even when that course of action is seen to be irrational).

Unfortunately this can become the path to all-too-predictable disaster.  It starts slowly -- encouraging Ukraine to ask for troops; the sending of mlitary ‘trainers’; then a small detachment of uniform troops … etc. Then quickly, as the rulers find their base assumptions were wrong.

Putin is not bluffing … When their troops come home in coffins, at that point, will they back off, or will the fear of seeming weak prompt them to do stupid things?