Small surprise
that is, for yesterday brought a most unsurprising (re)turn of events.
Electorates in Greece and France, asked for a verdict on recent EU policy,
rejected it soundly, as they invariably have done each time they were asked over
the last 30 years. Never mind that their rejection has never been heeded by the
European leadership, and will surely go ignored yet once again.
In France, M.
Hollande won the presidential elections with a convincing margin, on an uppity,
anti-austerity ticket which was a smack in the face of all Brussels Beurocrats.
Meanwhile, in Greece, the two big mega-corrupt parties, PASOK and New
Democracy, which in the past were bloodthirsty mortal enemies but found snug common
ground in their love of Brussels bullying, scored a mere 30 % of the
parliamentary vote, which gave them a neat 149 seats in the 300 seat parliament
(talk about rigging electoral laws to your advantage…!) Sadly this is just a
bit too little to reign together unopposed!
Consequently,
just about everybody is now desperately wondering what to do, what stand to
take, what flight routes to keep open, how to encounter their beloved friends
and allies in the arena of the European Coliseum, where the gladius and the trident reign supreme over the embrace and agape.
Back in Berlin,
Mrs Merkel is surely wondering how to face the new French president, with his
demands for growth stimulus, which can only be paid through Euro-inflation or
hiked taxes on the wealthy Germans. In London, I have no doubt, Mr Cameron is
plotting how to get a foot back into the European door so as to re-establish a
semblance of influence, without that foot being chopped off on sight by a
German bayonet or a French guillotine. For his part, however, M. Hollande must
be at a total loss how to behave now that the elections are won. He made clear
promises to his voters; yet everyone who counts for anything in the corridors
of power where votes are fully immaterial – the Brussels Elite, the Financial
Markets, the Rating Agencies, the IMF, the international conspiracy of Bankers,
the jubilant employers’ organisations – recognizes in those promises a frontal
attack on their recent unopposed supremacy and will fight the man’s petty
ambitions nails and teeth…
In Greece, the old dilemma is back again: stand up,
Thermopylae style, against the New Barbarian Invaders from Brussels and end up
like Leonidas’ heroic Spartans (i.e. world famous and convincingly dead), or
bend over forwards once again to be given IMF-director treatment in the
catamite way… And finally, there are normal European men and women, who work
for a living and worry about their children, who can’t make head or tails of
what is going on, but are wondering where to go with their savings now that the
venomous Euro may still go bust…
Et maintenant, que vais-je faire…?
The truth is
that nobody knows.
Nobody, Alfred?
No, not nobody, dear reader! One body of fine
folk knows perfectly well what they will be doing… Guess who? Indeed: the boys
and girls in Brussels: EU commissars, bureaucrats, MPs, PR managers,
translators, personal assistants, grandmothers, liaison agents, lobbyists,
champagne suppliers and caviar caterers… You know: the entire parasitic lot
that lives marvellously off the fat of our continent without having to show any
sort of utility or performance. These ones know with absolute clarity what they
wish and will do. To wit: save the Euro. For the Euro – much as it proved to be
the poison of the European economy, a completely failed experiment, the
millstone around the neck of 500 million people, an idiotic pipe dream of the
Frankenstein type – to them is a blessing. It is the incarnation of their
ambitions. It represents their mindboggling success so far. It is the political
bubble that must not be allowed to burst, whatever
the cost (to others)… A single step back, a single restriction, even one
tiny nation stepping out of this house of cards, would mean that Progress is Not
Only Forward, that questions may be asked, that the Trek towards Ever Closer
European Integration may be revealed to be a March of Folly…
No such thing
must ever be allowed to happen! Above the gates to Brussels there is a sign,
which reads: ‘Abandon Doubt All Ye Who Enter Here!’
Do I mean that
these folks are Evil? No, dear reader! Certainly not! They are merely very
happy with how things have been going so far. And they believe in themselves,
with the certainty of those who think invariably well of themselves…
Let there be no
misunderstanding: these Eurogues would rather plunge a nation or two into
unseen misery than to retreat one inch from their ambitions. But they do so
because they operate under a very special mindset. They consider themselves to
be the most benign agents of the ‘European Ideal’, a somewhat vague paradisiacal
notion of a continent at Permanent Peace, Prosperity and Happiness, which has
not had its equal since the Garden of Eden. This Ideal is an Absolute Good.
Whatever serves the ideal is desirable. Whatever does not serve the ideal must
be rotted out with fire and sword. The Ideal is above law divine or human. It
is beyond Good and Evil. It justifies whatever measures the Brussels Crowd may
take, no matter how inhuman, horrid or corrupt. I found a most instructive
parallel to this self-serving and self-deluding attitude in chapter 4 of John
Hooper’s book ‘The Spaniards’, where he explains how the Spanish officer corps
saw itself just before the civil war of the 1930s:
Whether [a Spanish officer]
was serving in the hills of Morocco or behind a desk in Madrid, it was obvious
that the distance between him and his fellow citizens was growing. This posed a
special problem for a body of men accustomed to regard themselves as
instruments of the collective will and they began to evolve the curious belief
that, even though they might not reflect the circumstantial preferences of the
electorate, they none the less embodied the eternal virtues of the fatherland.
And the fatherland, according to this theory, was infinitely more important
than the sum of its inhabitants. A distinction was beginning to be drawn
between Spain and the Spanish which in 1936 would serve to justify a war
against the majority of Spaniards as a war in defence of Spain.
Put Beurocrat in
the place of Officer, and Europe in the place of Spain, and you have a perfect
description of how our Brussels’ leadership regards itself and the populations
they are supposed to be accountable to. They serve a Higher Notion of Europe
which the Europeans are told either to swallow or to suffer.
Imagine how such
fine supercilious folk will treat a mere French president who dares to stand up
to them an inch! And then – once you have shaken your head in disbelief - guess
what they would do to a petty Mediterranean nation if the local populace dared
tell them, in the eternal words of yet another French chansonnier:
‘Va t’faire, homme incorrec
Voir par les Grecs’
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