Europe's unilateral disarmament

Yet another article in NRO warning Americans to back away from the European slippery slope to international futility. "Defense lessons from Europe" is no more superficial than most European writing about the States, but it does underline the low priority given to self-defence by European governments.

We are learning a lot from Europe these days, especially how not to govern a modern democratic nation. Unsustainable social-welfare spending, multiculturalism instead of assimilation for immigrants, and ever-decreasing defense budgets all demonstrate that the path Europe has been following is not the model for a government by the people. And most significantly, we learn that Europe’s defense budgets will continue to decrease unless there is a dramatic rearrangement of priorities among its peoples. The NATO secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, recently warned that “the budget decreases across the continent could have dire consequences: If the cuts are too deep, we won’t be able to defend the security on which our democratic societies and prosperous economies depend. We risk a Europe increasingly adrift from the United States”.

Americans still tend to write more politely about Europe than vice-versa, but their underlying contempt is beginning to wear through the veneer of good manners. Of course Europe is not a model for government by the people: it is explicitly a model for the unrestrained government of an unelected and unaccountable bureaucratic oligarchy.

Europe is now ruled by the form of government that once supplied the palpable continental enemy against which it was necessary to maintain a military deterrent. Now that, thanks to American power, no such immediate threat looms, the Euro-oligarchy's sole priority is to perpetuate its hold on power. Only war could break that hold, therefore the means of war must be abolished.

So it is that the linked article misses the point when it states, "elected officials cannot spend unlimited sums on social-welfare and entitlement programs and expect to maintain a functioning democracy, much less a vibrant economy". But unelected officials can, because they are insulated from the consequences of their policies.

Europe is not an illustration of the dangers of people-pleasing democracy: it is an object lesson in what happens when peoples surrender their autonomy. Those who sacrifice freedom on the altar of collective security end up with neither.   

Quote for the day - Autonomous Mind

EU leaders love globe trotting and telling the world about the wonder of democracy. But they sure as hell don’t practice what they preach. Out of all the member states only Ireland held a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty’s package of measures to dramatically increase the power of the EU at the expense of national sovereignty. That’s democratic? The cosy stitch up by of the political class serves no one’s interest but theirs, but they believe their own bullshit and think they are some kind of model democratic structure. In truth the EU is only a model for a modernised version of the totalitarian autocracy being thrown off by the people in north Africa. The only difference being the illusion of democracy where in truth none exists.

Full article here.

Rod Liddle - tsk, tsk

Purple prose from Liddle on Blair. Sod the legalities, he says, Blair's real crime was:

. . . a separate issue, upon which Blair is terribly culpable; more terribly culpable than any PM before or since.[1] We know for sure now and had indications at the time that Blair’s reasons for taking our country to war were not those which he deemed to share with the country or with parliament. [2] They were not shared because he was well aware that neither public nor parliamentary opinion would go along with him. And in attempting to convince the public of Saddam’s ownership of WMD he misled parliament, misled the public and pressurised, perverted or twisted every institution which might have acted as a check upon his messianic determination to wage war.[3] This included the select committees, the civil service, the security services, the government scientists and even in the end the BBC. Cabinet was ignored. As John Denham put it at the time, Blair demanded evidence of WMD regardless or not of whether WMD existed. This is incontestable; it is the subtext of all those Blair year diaries produced by the either supine, or in Alastair Campbell’s case, conniving, former members of the administration. I do not think it is stretching it to suggest that this was the closest Britain has come to totalitarianism.[4] Regardless or not of whether we were right to have invaded Iraq, we were lied to, repeatedly and the processes corrupted.

1. Ludicrous hyperbole. Judged by the consequences, Asquith and the secret agreement with France that led to Britain declaring war in 1914 makes Blair's commitment to Bush seem a minor lapse.

2. Untrue. He made his moral position perfectly clear long before cooking up the WMD subterfuge. He also explicitly stated that he regarded the USA as the only hope of realizing his hopes for a better world.

3. Not limited to the Iraq war. It was under Blair, not Brown, that England's ancient liberties were fatally undermined, applauded by such Labour party "moderates" as the cuckold Alan Johnson and absolutely NOT denounced with appropriate vehemence by the journopukes of Britain.

4. What makes Liddle think the danger is past? Our whole society has become corrupted, and a people without virtue not only cannot be, but does not deserve to be, free.

Thought for today from George Orwell's "1984"

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

EU press releases regurgitated

On Sunday the Independent reported that the EU is "considering" a £1bn fund to set up plants to use greenhouse gas to help recover North Sea oil, which, the report says, could extend their productive life by 50 years and "add £60bn to UK coffers".

If it were commercially viable, the oil companies would be doing it already. Sounds like a subsidy to me. 

The Sunday Times (£) reported that UK railway companies may face an investigation by the European Commission over the dumping of lavatory waste on the tracks and in railway stations.

Yeah well - that's a door the Eurocrats could not push open if ours were a competently governed country.

Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

Brian Micklethwait - soothscribe

Having purged my RSS of the main sources of intellectual dandruff, brushing the larger flakes into the Cūli emeritus causa permanent hall of shame, I can focus on the far more rewarding task of honouring those who enlighten the blogosphere with well-written and incisive commentary.

I should have selected Samizdata's Brian Micklethwait long ago. Today's article "They are not liberals and they are not progressives" is a good example. Indeed they are not: they are totalitarian statists and it's about time we all, systematically, stopped playing their semantic game.

Statist words will go on meaning what the statists want them to mean only if the real liberals and the real progressives allow such foolishness to continue. For the people who really do believe in liberty and in progress can now decide their own language. They can use their own preferred words amongst themselves and they can attach their own preferred words to their enemies, and when they do, there will not be a damn thing that the statists will be able to do to stop them.

Jason Smith - soothscribe

Doubles as quote of the - well, yesterday. The following from his post on Big Brother Watch.

On 1 October the Equality Act 2010 became law. Its stated intention is to end discrimination in the workplace. The likely result is it will poison relationships between colleagues and employer-employee. It urges us all to view ourselves as victims in need of state intervention to police our working lives. The legislation introduces the concept of ‘discrimination by perception’ and ‘association’ to more ‘protected characteristics’ which is particularly problematic. No discrimination needs to have taken place for a case to be made against a co-worker or employer. The ‘victim’ just has to perceive discrimination. The perceived discrimination doesn’t even need to be against someone in the workplace. You can feel discriminated against because you know a Muslim and someone makes a joke about burkas.

Last word on the New Labour "project"

Frank Furedi writes in Spiked that "Labour is dead". But what he describes is the collapse of the New Labour "project".

That was, very simply, the century-old Fabian or "Progressive" dream of becoming the party OF government. That is, for the party in power to employ so many people, and to make so many others beholden, that whether in office or not, power would continue to reside in the hands of the "progressive" party.

They failed in the States under Woodrow Wilson, and again under Franklin Roosevelt. They failed in Britain under Clement Atlee, again under Harold Wilson and again under the Blair-Brown regime.

It is a corrupt and corrupting idea that has debased everything it encompasses wherever it has been implemented. There are no ends in politics, only means, because the means inevitably become ends in themselves.   

One-party states don't work, guys. Give it up.