[In honor of today's Brexit-vote festivities, herewith a re-post of an earlier essay, originally posted 4 May 2014.]
~ ~ ~
Time was, in this country, and around the world, when
idealists used to dream of an End to All Wars -- to be enforced (a necessary
codicil, though not spoken so loud) by a One World Government.
Americans were among those in the
forefront of this, signally Woodrow Wilson, who garnered a Nobel Peace Prize
for his advocacy of the League of Nations (
la SDN), the first step towards such a new
order, established as the dust was settling from the
Great War.
But when push
came to shove, Senate Republicans and prairie populists
would have none of it, and Wilson’s
brainchild was a prophecy unhonored in its own country.
The ethos of that time
is now impossible to re-experience, though students of history may
imagine it. The Release 2.0
of the League, the United Nations, is mostly a debating shop, for harangues
that few heed. Not a bad
thing; good that it’s there; but no shadow or echo of the original
vision of One World Government (whose aftershadow lives on only in the nightmare
imagination of the prairie
populists).
~
Europe, however, shaken to its foundations by the deeper
trauma of the Second World War, which no-one ever imagined to dub “the Great”,
and which turned out even worse than our fears, adopted a more regional version
of the original vision, one which actually has some teeth to it: what is now known as the European
Union. The average American
has probably not even heard of the thing (indeed, I almost wrote “EEC” by
anachronism), but it is very real.
And its existence has no doubt contributed to the one big spectacular
fact of the past nigh-on seventy years, what must astonish any student of
European history (which has been bloodier at every level, than the non-devotee
has any idea): unbroken peace
among nations belonging to that Union.
An astonishment that grows with each passing year of No World War Three. And if there have, in the course of
those decades, been occasional instances of fussy Brusselian bureaucratic
overreach -- in one actual, notorious case, regulation of the length and curvature of
bananas -- this pales beside the Holocaust (to take one example, hm, at
random).
In time though, the freely adopted multiheaded yoke has come increasingly to chafe certain
individual withers; and resistance
to further EU encroachment has become a key issue in the upcoming pan-European
elections:
In part, this swell of opposition comes as a result of
actual EU overreach, such as the dismanteling of borders at a time of a great
“inwash of the unwashed” (see essays
here and
here), in part
because, from a more zeitgeistlich perspective, the diktats of Brussels have
encouraged fresh overreach by, for example, the misandrists of
Paris and
Stockholm,
who mean (and here I write hyperbolically, though only barely) to police and limit
(with a ruler, of the sort once used by nuns to smack the palms of naughty
boys) the length and curvature of erections.
[Update Memorial Day 2014; from the NZZ:
Europa und die EU, das sind
Klischees über Normen aller Art, etwa diejenige über
die Krümmung der Gurke, die zwar längst nicht mehr gilt, aber an
Stammtischen unvermindert als Beispiel einer fehlgeleiteten monströsen
Bürokratie angeführt wird.
OK, so maybe it was cucumbers, not bananas. Same idea.
 |
| Gurke mit Attitude |
~
~ Recommendation posthume ~
“Si j’étais encore en vie, et
que je désirais un bon whodunnit,
que lirais-je?"
(Je suis le Président Wilson, et
j’ai approuvé ce message)
~
Anyhow, all that is but by way of dilettante kibitzing; I am not among those solons such as
Thomas Friedman or George Will who
are licensed to pontificate each
Sunday, across from the editorial page. I do, however, carry an official Linguist’s License,
and am a paid-up member of the Global Sociophilological Association (QG: Genève -- it is actually a subunit of
the WDJ). And hence am
permitted to observe this new coinage, reported in this morning’s press:
L'écolo Durand s’en prend aux "Euro-tartuffes"
"Plus forts que les euro-sceptiques ou les euro-béats, voici venu le temps des euro-tartuffes", écrit-il. Soit, à
en croire Durand, ceux qui tiennent un discours à Paris et un autre à Bruxelles.
Which, being Englished for the convenience of our
obligate-anglophone friends, is no more than to say:
A prominent Green politician has coined a category to join
the extant extremes of the
Euro-sceptics
(those who oppose further EU encroachment), and the
euro-béats (difficult to translate exactly:
it refers to those
bobo-bisounours,
who embrace the Union and all its present and potential works, with a great big
smoochy kiss):
the opportunist
Euro-hypocrites (after Molière’s
character Tartuffe), who, speaking alternately out of either side of the mouth spout one thing in Brussels
and another thing at home: here to butter-up the goose, there to flatter the gander.
[
Updated here/ Mise à jour ici / Hier auf den neuesten Stand
gebracht:]
[Update 25 June 2016]
So, Brexit it is. In the feelgood media, there is plenty of
scolding against those yokels who voted for national sovereignty, and a paucity of
self-examination on the part of those who, like Merkel and the MSM, helped
bring this fracture about.
Thus, pursuing its human-interest brand of journalism, NPR
goes around interviewing this person and that person in England, whose school
or whatnot had been receiving part of its budget “from” the UE. Unmentioned is the sheer arithmetical
fact that Britain has long been a net contributor
to the rest of Europe -- they send
out more than they get back; and
what they get back comes with all sorts of Brussels-set restrictions and
conditions.
Or again the French.
It is by now admitted that concern over
uncontrolled immigration was a principle motivator (probably the main one) of
the Brexiteers;
Exhibit A being
the euphorically irresponsible
cave-in of Germany, Exhibit B (for England)
being France, which supinely admitted thousands of illegal intruders from
Africa, and -- doing nothing for their integration, which they don’t especially
desire anyway -- allowed them to accumulate up around Calais, where for years
they have been trying to barge their way into England; uncharacteristically, (with
scattered exceptions) Britain stood firm.
French editorialists now put a bizarre spin on this,
typical of the mentality that repelled the Brexiteers:
Brexit (largely a vote against
uncontrolled immigration) should mean that now Britain changes course and takes
all those unwanted Africans off French hands:
their Wonderland watchword for this is, that “the English
border should now move from Calais to Dover”.
If by that they mean that England can now be relieved
of bearing the bulk of the costs of insuring security in Pas de Calais, well
and good;
but the
bisounours will be disappointed if they
await the dissolution of the white cliffs at Dover.
-- Similarly, French politicians (such as Macron) have
followed Erdogan in using unwanted migrants as threat-material:
do as we say or we open the
floodgates.
But, all England
really has to do in this case is to dry-dock the ferries and shut the tunnel.
 |
|
Bienvenue en Françafrique !
|
Interestingly, readers are generally not fooled. From a comment in today’s Le Figaro:
Regardez combien présomptueux sont
ces eurocrates vexés, furieux des peuples qui ne votent pas comme ils veulent.
L'Angleterre est un grand pays, très grand, et ne se laissera pas imposer une
vitesse par des politicards. Pression? Tigres de papier.
Interestingly, readers are generally not fooled. From comments in today’s Le Figaro:
Regardez combien présomptueux sont
ces eurocrates vexés, furieux des peuples qui ne votent pas comme ils veulent.
L'Angleterre est un grand pays, très grand, et ne se laissera pas imposer une
vitesse par des politicards. Pression? Tigres de papier.
~
je suis mort de rire devant les
menaces . en fait les dirigeants de l'Europe c'est à dire Merkel et ses valets
n'ont pas apprécié qu'un pays les envoie balader de façon démocratique .
N'oublions jamais les paroles de Junker : "il ne peut y avoir de choix
démocratiques contre les décrets européens ". Au moins c'est clair de ce côté
du Chanel on n'aime pas les choix démocratiques et il fallait s'attendre à une
volée de bois vert .
[Update 29 June 2016] Jean-Claude
Juncker seems to be really getting into his role as the Dick Cheney of the
European Union. After blocking any input from the
individual parliaments of Europe, into the proposed CETA agreement with Canada,
Juncker sniffed that the whole thing was to him…. schnurzegal.
That is a very colloquial, even vulgar German
expression; difficult to
translate, but at a venture: “Like
I give a flying fuck.”
http://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article156690315/Schnurzegal-ob-die-nationalen-Parlamente-zustimmen.html
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/ceta-gabriel-nennt-eu-kommission-unglaublich-toericht-1.3055801
.
