The Ideology of Failure

by Stephen Pax Leonard

  The Brexit referendum must become a Berlin Wall moment, for Britain has shown that we can be liberated from Europe. We now have an opportunity to change the world and introduce a new national politics. The Brexit result is an excellent opportunity for Britain to look outwards, and not inwards. It is a chance for people to put freedom and sovereignty over GDP statistics and globalist sensibilities. Britain has shown that it can regain its place as a powerful, sovereign nation, and that it is stronger than the globalist, bureaucratic sand-castle in Brussels, which lacks both in a sense of common demos and mutual telos. The globalist groupthink dictated that any criticism of its project amounted to cultural atavism. With this kind of discourse, there is an insidious attempt here at invoking a falsified moral panic. The imperative is always that one must align oneself with the moral, cultural relativist community, and that this community has hegemony over morality issues.

  The anti-globalist vote has just laughed at that absurdly simplistic, unilateral vision. The road-map to a one-world Government is now in tatters. Putin said he would smash the New World Order (NWO) in 2016. Through Russia’s actions in Syria, he has shown that Russia can challenge any such order. He always said that ‘ordinary people’ would reject the ambitions of the globalists, and the Brexit vote has thankfully shown that he is right once again. The people voted against a single currency, a single banking system, a single army and most importantly a single political entity. The world now needs the age of anti-globalism, and there is every reason to believe its arrival is imminent, if it has not arrived already.

  Things can now change. Charmless, painfully mediocre Clinton offered nothing new, just walking in the shadows of her husband. Americans have perhaps grown tired of the Establishment globalists running the White House. Hillary Clinton was just another personification of the globalist elite lie: she pledged the same old, tired identity politics, and was a politically correct open-border pioneer who thought she had a right to be elected just because she was a woman. She would have put her country on a war footing with Russia. But it is all fine as long as we have gay marriage, which in a typically unprincipled manner she decided was a good thing only once polls showed people were on average in support of it. What was unthinkable prior to the Brexit Referendum and the Trump victory is now very much on the table. It is clear that globalisation benefited a tiny elite and countries such as China and India, but not the average man on the street in the West. This failure of globalisation and unconventional monetary policies explains in part the Brexit and Trump victories.

  As we have heard, political leaders in the West are no longer defending their country’s interests, but instead are ceding power to something untested, a globalist, bureaucratic machine in Brussels that has led to widespread economic misery on the Continent, where in some countries such as Portugal, over 20 per cent of the population live below the poverty line. Others such as Greece have become failed states, little more than pathetic EU protectorates. Since it joined the euro, Greece’s economy has shrunk by one third, and Italy’s economy has not grown at all. This machine extinguishes not only democracy and political legitimacy at every turn, but it does not even create economic growth.

  The leaders of European nations are willingly compromising their sovereignty and our democracy — that thing which is held dear by so many, or who at least have been told so many times we should defend it that they do so unthinkingly. Even for the sceptics, the argument is that we are too far down the road, and so in the words of Margaret Thatcher: ‘we agree for the sake of agreeing, and being Little Sir Echo we say “me too”’.142 Surely, one cannot stay in something just because it is difficult to get out. One does not stay in a house that is burning down, just because it is difficult to get out.

  From its very inception, it has in fact been the plan amongst the armies of Mephistophelean EU bureaucrats to get to the point where nation-states feel sufficiently uncomfortable about going into reverse that they introduce political union through the back door. And, indeed, with the Brexit debate it is clear that this has in fact worked as a policy. The majority of those who voted to stay in understood that the EU was corrupt and unworkable, but that we had gone so far that a reversal would be somehow more detrimental. Only once we voted to leave, did people realise how far we had gone down the federalist path (and potentially how difficult it might be to extricate ourselves from it).

  The EU technocrats realise that a crisis represents an opportunity. That is why Hollande, the most unpopular President in French history, and Merkel allowed the ‘refugee’ crisis to happen. When the problem looks overwhelming, they can respond by saying that challenges such as climate change and mass immigration cannot be dealt with at a national level. Apparently, only an army of EU bureaucrats can tackle such issues. In other European countries, the general public seems to fall for this reasoning. The result is that national governments look weak, and the impression created is one where the ‘big issues’ can only be solved by a small oligarchic group who have their hands on the levers of power. This is undoubtedly the plan. The EU is now absolutely open about the fact that it intends to create an EU superstate. However, there is now at least reasonable hope that this may backfire spectacularly, and people will see this deception for what it is. We have not yet entirely lost the grip on sovereignty, and the obvious flaws of the Schengen agreement were there for all to see after the Paris attacks of November 2015, and again in Berlin a year later. Now, that agreement is in tatters and effectively finished due to Merkel’s pig-headedness, arrogance and her unilateral invitation to all Syrian refugees to come to Europe in the absence of any European agreement. After a string of terrorist attacks in the summer of 2016, she could only manage to insult her own people further by saying Wir schaffen es.143 Wir schaffen what exactly? To turn Germany into the exact vision that ISIS portrayed in their policy document, Libya: The Strategic Gateway for the Islamic State (page 10), where militants were told to converge on Europe disguised as refugees. If she refuses to back down on her deeply unpopular policies, then we may see the incipient sociopolitical revolution move from the periphery to the centre of Europe. With recent challenges from the CSU on the issue of immigration, Merkel is left barely clinging onto power.

  There is a strong parallel here between the phalanx of liberal groupthink found in academia (commented upon in the essay ‘The Groupthink Trap’) and the thinking of elected leaders of EU nation-states. There are many that sense there are very serious mistakes with the EU project, but they dare not speak out. The EU body has become so big and powerful that nation-states feel there is more to be lost from not being in it, even if there are many aspects which alarm them.144 Those European states outside of it such as Norway, Switzerland and Iceland feel no doubt very differently about the matter, and must be breathing a sigh of relief that they did not concede to the bureaucratic monster.

  The defining characteristic of tyranny is the diversion of power from the people to an unelected elite, and thus it is reasonable to assume that the EU is a tyranny in the making. A tyranny is successful if the awareness of other possibilities has been removed. The EU Commissioners want more power, and intend to get it by replacing the nation-state model with a more virulent ideological substitute. Europe’s politicians are complicit in this: for example, the former Swedish Prime Minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, pushed through constitutional changes in 2009 to make it harder to leave the European Union (En reformerad grundlag, Prop. 2009/10: 80: p193). Many Swedish politicians claimed that they were given minimal time to discuss the proposed changes.

  The European Union is profoundly undemocratic and is anxious to remove all national electoral accountability and subsume it under an unaccountable European Commission. After ignoring the ‘No’ result in both the French and Dutch 2005 referendums on the Lisbon Treaty, we were told that we needed the Lisbon Treaty to ‘enhance democracy’ in the European Union. It sounds like a bad joke. The Irish cancelled their referendum on the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe as they had
assumed the Dutch and French results would put an end to the Lisbon Treaty, but also perhaps because the result of the Irish referendum on the Nice Treaty, where the Irish people voted ‘No’, was simply ignored. Wolfgang Schäuble, the German Interior Minister at the time, famously said: ‘A few million Irish cannot decide on behalf of 495 million Europeans’.145 Martin Schulz, the former President of the European Parliament, said, ‘Those who supported the No vote have opened the door to fascism’ (the much used tactic discussed in previous essays). It is quite right the EU needs to ‘enhance democracy’, but with every new treaty, it seems to be moving further and further away from any concept of representative democracy. The same Martin Schulz responded to Brexit by saying: ‘The British have violated the rules. It is not the EU philosophy that the crowd can decide its fate’ (27th June, 2016).146 This really tells us everything we need to know about the EU.

  The horrendous fudge of the Lisbon Treaty which amends the Maastricht Treaty and the Treaty of Rome, both of which form the constitutional basis of the European Union, takes democratic authority away from the people. The Irish voted ‘No’ in 2008 which should have killed the treaty, but instead they held another referendum, because the European Commission does not accept national opposition to its totalitarian plans. The same thing happened with the Treaty of Nice in 2001 and 2002. Unbelievably, both French and Dutch voters voted in 2005 against the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe. Along with the French, the Dutch, as founding members of the European Economic Community, voted with a 61.5 per cent majority against the European Constitution. The French National Assembly ratified the treaty, and thus it is clear that this representative democracy does not in fact represent anybody at all. If democracy stood for anything, this should have stopped the process of forming a European Constitution. Instead, member states were bullied and legislation riddled with subterfuge clauses was introduced through the back door. This will always be the way the European Union does business, because it is totally impractical to expect twenty-eight nation-states to agree on everything.

  The EU uses a familiar tyrannical methodology to deal with opposition. If an electorate votes against a treaty, then the result will either be ignored, or they will keep holding elections until they say ‘Yes’. It was the same with Denmark and the Maastricht Treaty. With Brexit, the former British Prime Minister, David Cameron, claimed that he had reached an agreement on the reforms that he petitioned for. The agreed concessions were absolutely insignificant, but were sold to the British public as if it would be a whole new EU, the product of a fundamental renegotiation. All of the benefits of membership could have been accrued through free and bilateral independent trading with European countries. Free trade does not require a supra-governmental bureaucratic crucible. That only slows the process down, and sometimes makes it impossible.147 Fortunately, the British public saw through the lies.

  Only fanatic liberals want some kind of world governance run by concealed fiscal and technocratic groups. The EU wants to standardise and homogenise our thinking with one set of policies and values instilled in a mass psychology: liberal capitalism, multiculturalism, one foreign policy to overthrow dictatorial regimes and replace them with ‘liberal democracies’; i.e. the message to the developing world is ‘come here and work to support our indebted service economy, and we will bomb to smithereens the regimes we do not like’. What is more, we will do it in the name of democracy. This is apparently what a progressive, open society based on globalised enslavement should look like. The brutality of the West is dressed up in the soft, comforting quilt of equality, tolerance and diversity.

  With every European treaty, more and more powers are taken away from national Governments and given to unelected European Commissioners. With the Lisbon Treaty which came into force on 1st December 2009, national parliaments are no longer able to amend European legislation, member states’ veto has been removed in the Council of Ministers and the EU has expanded into many new policy areas (common fisheries policy, competition rules, customs union) where it has ‘exclusive competence’ excluding any action by member states.

  The shift in power and the manner in which it is enforced is scandalous, and has no place in any permutation of a free democracy. The European Parliament, which is of course not a parliament at all as there is no government and no opposition, is the first parliament in history not to have the power to propose or repeal legislation. The Parliament represents nothing more than a gesture to convince national electorates that the European Parliament is the ultimate democracy, when in fact it is little more than a fraudulent gesture. The European Parliament, so distant from its citizens, is effectively a talking shop; its power is symbolic. With very low turnout for European Parliament elections, it lacks any kind of democratic legitimacy. Legislation comes from the unelected Commissioners, the Politburo, and their 230,000 staff. It is only on the basis of a Commission proposal that EU Council Ministers are allowed to deliberate at all. So it is not necessarily the case that British representatives at the Council can stop laws that go against our own interests.

  Powers have been transferred to unaccountable and anti-democratic bodies such as the ECB, who claim that such a transfer was necessary in the name of crisis management — a crisis which they (in conjunction with Germany’s export mercantilism that led to the balance of payments crisis) themselves engineered. These bodies decided they will have complete legal immunity for themselves (as set out in Protocol on Privileges and Immunities of the European Communities). European Monetary Union was a fudge from beginning to end. Everybody in the financial markets knew that. The debt ratios of Belgium, Italy, Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands and Austria all failed the Maastricht criteria in 1998. Belgium’s debt-to-GDP ratio was 124 per cent at the time of entry, but it had to be below 60 per cent. The agreed criteria written into the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union were simply ignored. It was also obvious that the political desire on behalf of a few leaders (and not the overall population, which was largely against it) was such that it would be forced through even if that meant serving up lies, misinformation and never-ending compromises.

  Financial convergence aside, a conspiracy theorist would surely suggest that the EU has allowed mass immigration to destroy the coherence of nation-states and undermine national sovereign Governments, so that they can impose their non-virtuous EU governmental oligarchy. Following the Greek financial crisis, the response by the French President Hollande was to say on the 20th of July 2015 at the height of the migration crisis that the problem was that ‘we needed more Europe, and not less of it’.148 He went on to say that it is time to create a Government of Eurozone countries. Tragically, member states signed off on this hand-over of power to unelected oligarchs when they signed the Amsterdam Treaty and the Treaty of Lisbon (which was not even signed by the British Prime Minister). Just as Jacques Delors predicted in 1998, the irremovable European Commissioners might be making up to 80 per cent of the laws that affect member states.149 According to the House of Commons Library, 59 per cent of laws affecting the UK in certain sectors over the last five years have been made in Brussels.150 These overpaid, grey bureaucrats wish to control the global masses, even their thinking. And most people do not even know who they are. As Margaret Thatcher said: ‘What is the point of being elected to this Parliament, just to give all the powers away?’ (30th October, 1990).151

  The European Commission, the executive branch of the EU staffed largely by rootless transnationals, wants to strip out the last vestiges of national sovereignty and make national elections irrelevant. The unelected EU President has been explicit about this, and it represents frankly the ingredients of a revolution. The former Vice-President of the European Commission, Viviane Reding, said in her speech at the University of Passau (8th November, 2012):

  At Maastricht people wanted to have us believe that we could irreversibly establish a monetary union and a new world currency without creating a United States of Europe at the same time. That was a mistake
, and now that mistake needs to be corrected if we want to continue to live in a stable, economically prosperous Europe; I believe a United States of Europe is the right vision to surmount the current crisis, but above all to overcome the failings of the Maastricht Treaty. Ultimately, as a European Christian Democrat, I cannot allow my vision of the future to be dictated by British Eurosceptics.

  What we are witnessing now is a silent crisis of democracy at the heart of Europe, an emergence of a bureaucratic oligarchy on the pretext of being the only medicine for financial turmoil. Europe is now a continent of EU-sponsored coup d’état, led by the world’s expert on tax evasion, Jean-Claude Juncker. One might ask what kind of democracy chooses its President in secret meetings, as the EU did. What is more, the first President of the European Union, Herman Van Rompuy, who liked to tell us the nation-state is dead, appeared to be completely unknown to everybody outside Belgium. It is ironic that we should have to hear this message from somebody who comes from a country that is so torn along nationalist lines: it has two parliaments and two Governments.

  In time, many people might look back at this Europe and ask how this federalisation was ever allowed to happen. The answer is: just as with mass immigration, the vast majority of people were never asked, and when they were their opposition was overruled. Now that euroscepticism has shown its true colours with the Brexit result, we must campaign to ensure that every member state lets its people decide the future of this dictatorial project. According to the European Commission’s own research, only 23 per cent of the EU population believed in May, 2013 that ‘things are going in the right direction’ when it comes to the EU.152 And, no wonder. Sometimes the EU is even explicit about creating a European Government by stealth. The final report of the Future of Europe Group (September, 2012) includes a proposal for ‘a directly elected Commission President who personally appoints the members of his European Government’.153 The people of Europe were told this was necessary as it was the only way to hold the peace in Europe, because nationalism always leads to war. But it has nothing to do with peace and belligerent nation-states. In my opinion, it is much more likely that the emergence of a totalitarian superstate — the multiculturalist juggernaut — will lead to war.