A Most Nobel Joke

The Dove of Peace

Fascism is on the rise again in Germany and in Greece. In the latter country, immigrants are being violently assaulted in proletarian neighbourhoods, Germans are called Nazis as a matter of course and Mrs Merkel is being painted as ‘Hitler’s Daughter’. In Germany, the warm romantic love for holiday destinations like Greece and Spain is being replaced by sarcasm and hatred of corrupt Latin freeloaders. Germans and Dutch tourists in Greece refuse to pay their restaurant bills with the excuse that ‘we already paid you ten times over through the bail-outs and your highways’. In retaliation, elderly Dutch tourists are beaten up by tipsy thugs in Greek streets for being arrogant Krauts…

In Holland, Finland, Austria and Italy, bizarre modern varieties of Ernest Roehm’s SA-style petty bourgeois populist parties are on the rise, because normal, hard-working people are quickly losing all respect for their leaders, who play elected lackeys to the unelected Brussels bureaucrats, and neglect, ignore and mistreat their own populations, so as to please their aristocratic masters. All over the continent, as democratic rights are being quietly curbed, the sovereign people begin to lose their faith in the democratic system.

In Spain, Catalonia is making good and timely use once again of the EU-induced weakness of Madrid’s tottering central government, so as to move towards a unilateral declaration of independence… An almost guaranteed recipe for yet another Spanish Civil War.

The streets are burning in Athens, Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon and Paris, as riot police is called out to stifle protests by union members, schoolteachers, medical doctors, miners, elderly pensioners and other fanatic red commie revolutionaries who do not understand that Troika-inspired Slash and Burn austerity is good for them.

Banks are being assaulted, their employees threatened with violence, by desperate depositors, driven to despair. Workers are kicked out of their jobs, the unemployed are kicked out of their houses, the homeless are kicked out of the national health service, and so on and so forth…

All this vicious violence is the direct and immediate consequence of the European Union’s megalomaniac introduction of the single currency, and the shocking mismanagement of the crisis that came in its wake; a mismanagement inspired exclusively by the desire to save the toxic single currency – and thereby the project of unification under the unelected, power-hungry oligarchy – instead of saving the national economies and their populations.

And here comes the Oslo Nobel Prize committee and gives the Nobel Peace Price to the European Union! It is of course a sublime joke, one that once again ‘makes satire obsolete’. The European Union as the grower of olive branches and fluffy white doves? Don’t make old Alfred bleeding laugh! You might as well give a medal to General Pinochet for bringing democracy to Chile, to Neville Chamberlain for his prevention of World War II, or to Adolf Hitler for his crucial contribution to the founding of Israel!

The rationale which the Oslo Committee cites for its choice is an old one, a slogan which gets repeated again and again and again ad nauseam, because it sounds so lofty and makes our dusty Brussels apparatchiks look so good. The prize is granted – so they say - because ‘the  European Union has brought 60 years of peace to a continent ruined by war for centuries’.

Dear reader, this is the sheerest baloney. It is no more than a convenient, shameless lie. Is it really probable that the recent decades of peace between France and Germany – for that is what it is all about - is due to a bunch of overpaid bureaucrats in snug little offices in Brussels town? Oh, come on! Get real! And pay some heed to the historian here!

Here is why there has been peace between France and Germany for the last 70 years. After the Second World War, the polarity of opposing power blocks changed radically, from the triad London–Paris–Berlin to the plain duality of Washington versus Moscow, each with its own  treaty organisation. France and Germany (the half that mattered, that is) now found themselves in the same camp. Both possessed the same political set-up of parliamentary democracy. Each enjoyed an identical economic system of regulated capitalism. They had the same friends and a single, common enemy. They had the same interests. And it is a natural law of geopolitics, that those nations which share the same political system, economy, allies, enemies and interests, do not go to war with one another. This is why there has been peace on the French-German border for the last 70 years. It has nothing to do with Common Market bureaucrats pushing papers around in Brussels offices so as to regulate the trade in coal and steel.

In short: to pretend that the European Union has brought Peace In Our Time, is about as valid as a dancing shaman taking credit for the falling rain.

And granting the Nobel Peace Prize to the now perverse European Union, is a slap in the face of all the truly deserving who were so honoured in the past, such as Albert Schweizer, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Elie Wiesel, Mother Teresa and Rigoberta Menchu.  

Dove of Peace after EU treatment

If you think I am the only idiot who does not cheer the wisdom of the Nobel Prize Committee, check out this column by the oh so foolish Dan Hannan, who is about as eloquent as that other dunce, Edward Gibbon, and as wise as that famous fool, Winston Churchill.