Faced with a choice between democracy and supra-nationalism, the European Union almost always opts for supra-nationalism ...
It is very difficult to have a functioning democracy unless people feel enough in common one with another to accept government from each other’s hands. If you want government for and by the people, you have to have a people that everyone recognises some identity with, some allegiance to.
To put it in another way, democracy needs a ‘demos’, a unit with which we identify when we use the word ‘we’. I am not saying it is simple. People can sustain multiple loyalties, populations can be interspersed, but our prejudice, other things being equal, should be towards national self-determination. If you take the ‘demos’ out of democracy, you are left only with the ‘kratos’, with the power of a system that must compel by law what it dare not ask in the name of civic patriotism.
Historically, that openness has made it possible for people from many different backgrounds not only to come to these shores, but, far more importantly, to acquire a common national citizenship and identity... But the recent emergence of unaccustomed and bitter divisions over language and culture—particularly the movement to tear down our national heritage in the name of a vaguely defined “multiculturalism”—is beginning to make many Americans realize something that common sense and forethought might have told them years ago: that America’s ability to perform this alchemy of souls is not infinite. To believe that we possess such a limitless capacity is, as the ancient Greeks recognized, to court Nemesis, fate’s punishment for those who think they have become as gods.
European Parliament, Strasbourg - 24 November 2010 Speaker: Nigel Farage MEP, UKIP, Co-President of the Europe of Freedom and Democracy (EFD) Group
Transcript:
Good morning, Mr van Rompuy,
You've been in office for one year and in that time the whole edifice is beginning to crumble, there's chaos, the money's running out - I should thank you; you should perhaps be the pin-up boy of the Eurosceptic movement.
But just look around this chamber, this morning. Just look at these faces. Look at the fear. Look at the anger. Poor old Barroso here looks like he's seen a ghost.
They're begining to understand that the game is up and yet in their desperation to preserve their dream, they want to remove any remaining traces of democracy from the system. And it's pretty clear that none of you have learnt anything.
When you yourself, Mr van Rompuy, say that the euro has brought us stability. I suppose I could applaud you for having a sense of humour, but isn't this, really, just the bunker mentality?
Your fanaticism is out in the open. You talked about the fact that it was a lie to believe that the nation state could exist in the 21st Century globalised world. Well, that may be true in the case of Belgium, who haven't had a government for six months, but for the rest of us, right across every member state in this Union - and perhaps this is why we see the fear in the faces - increasingly people are saying, 'We don't want that flag. We don't want the anthem. We don't want this political class. We want the whole thing consigned to the dustbin of history.'
And we had the Greek tragedy earlier on this year, and now we have this situation in Ireland. Now I know that the stupidity and greed of Irish politicians has a lot to do with this. They should never ever have joined the euro. They suffered with low interest rates, a false boom and a massive bust.
But look at your response to them. What they're being told, as their government is collapsing, is that it would be inappropriate for them to have a general election. In fact Commissioner Rehn here said they had to agree their budget first before they'd be allowed to have a general election.
Just who the hell do you think you people are?
You are very very dangerous people, indeed. Your obsession with creating this Euro state means that you're happy to destroy democracy. You appear to be happy for millions and millions of people to be unemployed and to be poor. Untold millions must suffer so that your Euro dream can continue.
Well it won't work. Because it's Portugal next, with their debt levels of 325% of GDP, they're the next ones on the list, and after that I suspect it will be Spain. And the bailout for Spain would be seven times the size of Ireland's and at that moment all of the bailout money has gone - there won't be anymore.
But it is even more serious than economics. Because if you rob people of their identity. If you rob them of their democracy, then all they are left with is nationalism and violence. I can only hope and pray that the Euro project is destroyed by the markets before that really happens.
And that's the spirit that Big Kev wants to bring to this hemisphere.
The European Union of course does not represent an identikit model of what we would seek to develop in the Asia Pacific.
But what we can learn from Europe is this – it is necessary to take the first step.
In the 1950s, sceptics saw European integration as unrealistic.
But most people would now agree that the goal of the visionaries in Europe who sat down in the 1950s and resolved to build prosperity and a common sense of a security community has been achieved.
It is that spirit we need to capture in our hemisphere.
Our special challenge is that we face a region with greater diversity in political systems and economic structures, levels of development, religious beliefs, languages and cultures, than did our counterparts in Europe.
The age of the nation state is over and the idea that countries can stand alone is an ‘illusion’ and a ‘lie’, the EU president believes. In one of the most open proclamations of the goal of a European superstate since the heyday of Jacques Delors, Herman Van Rompuy went on to denounce Eurosceptism as the greatest threat to peace.
... Mr Van Rompuy’s speech in the German capital told his audience that ‘the time of the homogenous nation state is over’. He added that the ‘danger’ of Euroscepticism was spreading beyond the confines of countries such as Britain and was becoming a stronger force across the whole continent. ‘We have together to fight the danger of a new Euroscepticism,’ he declared. ‘This is no longer the monopoly of a few countries.
So now it’s cards on the table, the big lie exposed, all pretence over. After decades during which the peoples of Europe were told that the EU posed no threat to the sovereignty of member states, the European Council President Herman von Rompuy has finally stated that the real purpose of the EU is nothing less than to destroy the nation state...
So the greatest danger to the EU is... democracy, and those who support the right of a country to govern itself. Nations lead to nationalism; nationalism leads to war; abolish the nation and you abolish war. This is a clear exposition of the doctrine of ‘transnational progressivism’ that has become the orthodoxy in western ‘progressive’ circles. It is, of course, as absurd as it is sinister.
Officials in a California school district said a middle school student was told to take a U.S. flag off his bike to avoid "racial tension."
Denair Unified School District Superintendent Edward Parraz said Cody Alicea, 13, was told not to fly the U.S. flag from his bike while at Denair Middle School after complaints from other students ...
Parraz said racial tensions boiled over at the school this year around the Cinco de Mayo holiday.
May whites have a racial identity? Are they allowed to be glad they are white or to think about what is good for them as a group?
Shelby Steele, a black scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University doesn’t say “no”; he says “hell no”.
“[B]eyond an identity that apologizes for white supremacy, absolutely no white identity is permissible. In fact, if there is a white racial identity today it would have to be white guilt—a shared, even unifying, lack of racial moral authority.”
Dr. Steele continues: “Black children today are hammered with the idea of racial identity and pride, yet racial pride in whites constitutes a grave evil. Say ‘I’m white and I’m proud’ and you are a Nazi.”
Dr. Steele means all whites everywhere: “Today’s whites, the world over, cannot openly have a racial identity.”
So party while you can, but mind the increasingly loud clock ticking away in the corners of your consciousness.
The clock that reminds you how little time you and yours have left...
you will lose...
It is coming, and soon.
This isn’t hubris. It isn’t ideology. It is not wishful thinking.
It is math...
The kind of math that proves how your kind -- mostly older white folks beholden to an absurd, inaccurate, nostalgic fantasy of what America used to be like -- are dying.
You’re like the bad guy in every horror movie ever made, who gets shot five times, or stabbed ten, or blown up twice, and who will eventually pass -- even if it takes four sequels to make it happen -- but who in the meantime keeps coming back around, grabbing at our ankles as we walk by, we having been mistakenly convinced that you were finally dead this time.
Fair enough, and have at it. But remember how this movie ends.
Our ankles survive.
You do not...
... in the pantheon of American history, conservative old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame, the folks unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms.
Fine, keep it up. It doesn't matter.
Because you’re on the endangered list.
And unlike, say, the bald eagle or some exotic species of muskrat, you are not worth saving...
It's OK. Because in about forty years, half the country will be black or brown. And there is nothing you can do about it...
Do whatever you gotta do, but remember that those who are the victims of your greed and indifference take the long view.
They know, but you do not, that justice is not for the sprinters, but rather for the long distance runners who will be hitting their second wind, right about the time that you collapse from exhaustion...
Because those who have lived on the margins, who have been abused, maligned, targeted by austerity measures and budget cuts, subjected to racism, classism, sexism, straight supremacy and every other form of oppression always know more about their abusers than the abusers know about their victims...
And they know how to regroup, and plot, and plan, and they are planning even now -- we are -- your destruction.
And I do not mean by that your physical destruction...
We just have to be patient.
And wait for you to pass into that good night, first politically, and then, well...
Do you hear it?
The sound of your empire dying? Your nation, as you knew it, ending, permanently?
Because I do, and the sound of its demise is beautiful.
File under: transnational progressivism - as absurd as it is sinister.
