Ten years back, I posted an excerpt from a WW2 American espionage manual showing workers in occupied Europe how to bureaucratically sabotage their organizations to harm Nazi Germany’s war efforts. At the time I joked that it also sounded like a lot of company meetings in the modern world. Brivael Le Pogam uses the same set of guidelines to illustrate just how much the EU has embraced these sabotage methods as their standard operating practices:
Link goes to full text at Wikisource
🚨 The OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944) describes how to paralyze an organization without explosives.
The European Union seems to have taken it as its official instruction manual. Here are the disturbing similarities:
1. “Insist on everything going through official channels.”
✅ 27 states, 24 official languages, 3 seats, thousands of committees and agencies. Even a directive on lightbulbs goes through 7 levels of validation.2. “Hold meetings. Speak at length with anecdotes.”
✅ 45-minute speeches in the European Parliament on minor topics. Strasbourg and Brussels locals applaud politely.3. “Refer everything to committees. Make them as large as possible (never fewer than 5 people).”
✅ The trilogue, COREPER, working groups, expert committees … A simple decision turns into a 3-to-7-year obstacle course.4. “Bring up unrelated matters repeatedly.”
✅ Talking agriculture? Let’s add the Green Deal, LGBT rights, Palestine, and the carbon border tax. Nothing is ever straightforward.5. “Haggle over the precise wording of communications.”
✅ Months of negotiation over a semicolon in a 400-page regulation. The word “should” vs. “must” can stall everything.6. “Reopen decisions that have already been made.”
✅ Directive adopted? We reopen it 2 years later for “revision”, “strengthening”, or “adaptation to the geopolitical context”.7. “Advocate caution and deliberation. Avoid all haste.”
✅ “We need more time to study the impact”, “let’s consult stakeholders more”, “better safe than sorry”. Result: nothing moves quickly.8. “Question the legitimacy of every decision.”
✅ “Is this really within the EU’s competence?” (even when it’s already in the treaties). Subsidiarity invoked when convenient, forgotten when not.The EU doesn’t need Russian or Chinese saboteurs. It has turned itself into a machine for slowing down Europe, exactly as the manual recommended to weaken the enemy.
The funniest part? All of this is done legally, democratically, and with the best intentions.
Automatically translated from the original French by X.
