{"id":103544,"date":"2026-07-12T03:00:03","date_gmt":"2026-07-12T07:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=103544"},"modified":"2026-07-10T11:41:33","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T15:41:33","slug":"this-used-to-be-active-sabotage-now-its-standard-eu-practice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/07\/12\/this-used-to-be-active-sabotage-now-its-standard-eu-practice\/","title":{"rendered":"This used to be active sabotage … now it’s standard EU practice"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ten years back<\/a>, 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<\/a> uses the same set of guidelines to illustrate just how much the EU has embraced these sabotage methods as their standard operating practices:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Link goes to full text at Wikisource<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

\ud83d\udea8 The OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual<\/em> (1944) describes how to paralyze an organization without explosives.<\/p>\n

The European Union seems to have taken it as its official instruction manual. Here are the disturbing similarities:<\/p>\n

1. “Insist on everything going through official channels.”
\n\u2705 27 states, 24 official languages, 3 seats, thousands of committees and agencies. Even a directive on lightbulbs goes through 7 levels of validation.<\/p>\n

2. “Hold meetings. Speak at length with anecdotes.”
\n\u2705 45-minute speeches in the European Parliament on minor topics. Strasbourg and Brussels locals applaud politely.<\/p>\n

3. “Refer everything to committees. Make them as large as possible (never fewer than 5 people).”
\n\u2705 The trilogue, COREPER, working groups, expert committees … A simple decision turns into a 3-to-7-year obstacle course.<\/p>\n

4. “Bring up unrelated matters repeatedly.”
\n\u2705 Talking agriculture? Let’s add the Green Deal, LGBT rights, Palestine, and the carbon border tax. Nothing is ever straightforward.<\/p>\n

5. “Haggle over the precise wording of communications.”
\n\u2705 Months of negotiation over a semicolon in a 400-page regulation. The word “should” vs. “must” can stall everything.<\/p>\n

6. “Reopen decisions that have already been made.”
\n\u2705 Directive adopted? We reopen it 2 years later for “revision”, “strengthening”, or “adaptation to the geopolitical context”.<\/p>\n

7. “Advocate caution and deliberation. Avoid all haste.”
\n\u2705 “We need more time to study the impact”, “let’s consult stakeholders more”, “better safe than sorry”. Result: nothing moves quickly.<\/p>\n

8. “Question the legitimacy of every decision.”
\n\u2705 “Is this really within the EU’s competence?” (even when it’s already in the treaties). Subsidiarity invoked when convenient, forgotten when not.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The funniest part? All of this is done legally, democratically, and with the best intentions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Automatically translated from the original French by X.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8,62,84],"tags":[382,476,337],"class_list":["post-103544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-europe","category-government","tag-cia","tag-espionage","tag-eu"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-qW4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103544"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103544\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103547,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103544\/revisions\/103547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}