After years of manic anguish, threats, intrigue, and maneuver, the United Kingdom will finally leave the European Union on Friday.
Big Ben should be tolling. Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead! Dorothy can go back to Kansas—or the Midlands.
The lifelong ambition of Nigel Farage deserves a lordship and a knighthood for his undying and patriotic efforts over decades. He will finally see the return of trade, money, borders, laws, and independence itself, to the British people.
Brexit, the massively consequential, world-historic demonstration of economic populism and anti-globalism will come to fruition, thanks to the shattering electoral victory of the eurosceptic Conservative Party—led by their clever Etonian, former mayor of London, and now prime minister, Boris Johnson.
And it was Donald J. Trump who backed both of them and fully endorsed Brexit as a sage policy—even before he was elected president. Once in office, the pro-sovereignty president has been relentless in his support and in offering a wide-ranging, U.S.-UK free trade agreement, at precisely the necessary time and to great mutual benefit. Who knows, in a year the British may perhaps be enjoying some of our famous chlorinated chicken.
In retrospect today, in the midst of all the celebrations, it is time to relate some less than fully known truths about this many decades-long Brussels fiasco.
The first disclosure goes back to the very founding of the European Union.
Already in 1952, Jean Monnet, one of the leftist French minds behind the European abduction, candidly said, “Europe’s nations should be led towards a superstate, without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation.”
The European Union and its antecedents were a product of ideologues and continentalists opposed to all English Lockean traditions and common law. They were people who instead followed the concept of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “general will.”
European Rechtsstaat ideas of collectivism, statism, protectionism, and corporatism are not so apparent as the Blitz and the Wehrmacht, which is the reason they were successfully established in Europe under the garb and false pretense of the all-powerful European Union. The Fabian strategy of avoiding conflict while grabbing as much power as possible worked for over four decades.
Since the end of World War II, the Brits were bamboozled and its leaders acquiesced to, and at times even appeased, the promotion of European integration against their better judgment and the national interest. Some surrendered their citizenship wanting instead to be “European” and members of a global elite.
Recall that at first, France’s Charles De Gaulle treated the British as supplicants and vetoed their application to join the clubby European project. Battered Britain licked its wounds until 1973 when she was finally allowed in the club.
The anti-democratic European project was established in the name of preventing the spread of Soviet-style Communism but instead became a halfway house. Brussels never had as much power over its member states as Moscow did, but the leftist, socialist influence drew them ever closer. It was soon the nexus of more and more centralization and illiberalism, and aptly dubbed the “EUSSR” by many of its critics.
Largely because of American pressure, Britain allowed Europe to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Yes, this is the second disclosure. The United States actively promulgated the plan on its allies and forced the Brits to join. This has had adverse consequences, most especially the utterly counterproductive anti-American prejudice to which it gave birth.
By encouraging the EU’s growth and development, the United States has unintentionally set up a major adversary—diplomatically, economically, politically, and militarily, in spite of supposed NATO defense obligations (with which the Europeans still don’t comply). The unipolar moment America enjoyed after defeating the Soviet Union was the breathing space needed to try another alternative.
Finally, after decades of strained and mostly one-way trans-Atlanticism, Trump has turned the course, upset the tables like Jesus in the Temple, and altogether disrupted the ancient regime.
In fact, the deep roots of the European Union lay bare its darker and true orientation.
As Jacques Delors, the former president of the European Commission himself once quipped, “Governmental elites should be involved on the central decision-making process and increasingly identify with it . . . the process is not, in itself, democratic.”
Next ugly disclosure: This led to the real iron cage which should not be overlooked, namely, German hegemony.
The EU was always supposed to be a way to both contain and expand the bogeyman of Europe, an uncontrollable Germany. The German Bundesbank admitted as much throughout the latter 1990s. After the reunification of east and west, the Bundesbank proudly pronounced: “The Federal Republic will ultimately be the country which profits most from European unity, even if this is not immediately visible.”
The essential truth is that American statesmen nurtured this European Movement and enmeshed democratic, common law, individualist, and Anglo-tradition bound Britain into an undemocratic, socialist, statist, foreign hyper-organization. By suborning democracy, the CIA in particular, ironically submerged Britain’s national interests to those of Europe as a whole. Even then, the deep state always thought it knew best.
The offer of unfulfilled promises of prosperity, security, and commercial advantage has proved illusory.
Fortunately, Britain avoided the debacle of the fake currency, the Euro, which lies at the heart of the European disaster. Nigel Farage got his start in populist agitation in the campaign against joining the Euro. The instability of the European system is reflected in its stagnant economies, grossly rigid structures, high unemployment, and low growth. To the extent that leaving the EU is even possible, the victory of Sterling over the Euro in spite of Tony Blair’s premiership was the vital turning point in this history.
Pity the poor(er) southern European states, faced with an economic crisis having surrendered both fiscal and monetary policy to the EU—fighting against Germany’s economic might with their hands tied behind their backs.
Of course, if the Euro fails, Europe fails.
So, it is noteworthy that German Chancellor Angela Merkel repeatedly reminded us that, “We have a treaty under which there is no possibility of paying to bail out states in difficulty.”
And many European states are experiencing great difficulties right now. Those countries’ loss is Germany’s gain.
The EU is either a European Germany or a German Europe. Take your pick. Europe always seemingly revolves around the so-called German question—i.e., assertiveness and dominance by the former Prussians.
The 19th-century German idealist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte perhaps said it best: in Germany, freedom was transcendental, and that nation had a “special destiny” (besonderes Schicksal) in history to march toward it. Even if this romanticism meant imposing its will or eliminating others in the process, so be it—at any and all costs. Germany needed Lebensraum.
Remember, it was the intellectual and upper classes that allowed the emergence of the Third Reich due in large part to what later came to be known as the “authoritarian personality,” a.k.a., transfigured Nazis.
German tutelage still saturates all of Europe and is consolidated through the single currency, the single market, dominance in interest rates (ECB), strict industry standards and protocols, overly bureaucratic laws, and a panoply of regulations. In the German language, this haughtiness is translated as hochmutig—the bitter envy and disgust for “the other” and lesser beings.
Of all this, Britain is now free. The Stockholm Syndrome of hostage-taking is over and Britons no longer need to love their captors. Like Gollum breaking the spell of the One Ring to Rule Them All over his mind, nothing more was necessary than the will to turn your back and say “No.”
Brussels, it turns out, is after all a nonplace—generic, dysfunctional, technocratic, cosmopolitan, and completely dystopian.
Free of the European Union, the UK now has an historic opportunity. A new Renaissance beckons. The “Great” can be put back into Britain, as Trump would say.
Trade and innovation can flourish, again. As a free-trading nation-state, Britain can make its own way (on taxes and tariffs), secure its own borders and laws, defend itself, and experience much greater prosperity.
In two short years, let alone five or 10, Britain will be a real beacon, a light of freedom and all of Europe would be well advised to follow in her footsteps. The irreformable, antidemocratic Leviathan must be tamed or slain.
Auf Wiedersehen EU—and good riddance!