Europe after the rain

Now that the grand European folly is cracking along its fault lines, what will the post-European world look like? The post-American meme – possibly partly due to Mark Steyn’s latest offering [which I’ve yet to read] – is beginning to seep into mainstream consciousness, but post-Europeanism is far harder to predict. The history of the European project will read a little like a marine engineer’s report on the seaworthiness of the Titanic. Meanwhile, the world economy broods in the corner like a dyspeptic bouncer.
If the American economy does pull up lame – and Heffer in Saturday's Mail provides sobering analysis - and the USA becomes more insular and less concerned with policing the world [a demonstrably thankless task], and if Europe reverts to the differential gearing of continental nation states, there will be a void, a job vacancy. Wanted: Superpower. Immediate start. As The Stranglers once sang; Who wants the world?
The love affair between the British liberal left and the European project has always been reducible to the former’s ill-disguised hatred of America. This is partly because America is seen as Israel’s sponsor – and the British left are rabidly anti-Semitic, although they disguise this beneath a masquerade mask of anti-Zionism – and partly because America has shown that multi-ethnicity works without the attendant nonsense of multiculturalism.
Personally, I have never had a problem with conspiracy theory number 47b, the one where the Jews run the world in secret via the banks. Capitalism has pulled more people out of poverty than any other –ism [Marxism, anyone? Thought not], and if Jews have the controls, then as far as I’m concerned the bagels are on the house. To me, it’s instructive that when the Mafia wanted a banker, they didn’t promote an Italian but chose a Jew, Meyer Lansky. But the current crisis is not capitalism’s hubris, but the end result of unregulated greed.
As for ethnic mix – the bane of far-right knuckle-scrapers across Europe – it’s a demonstrably good thing. I was told by a psychology student who is now reading a PhD in behavioural genetics at the University of Colorado that the country with the purest racial heritage – and thus prime DNA for study – is Iceland. The first country to default, you will recall [although I believe the patient took its medicine and is recovering]. The noted eugenicist Adolf Hitler believed that a racially pure Germany would conquer the world. That’s all very well if you want a race of humourless, six-foot-seven, blonde bureaucrats, but America won that particular game with an ethnic melting pot that would have appalled the squinting, pinch-faced Austrian maniac. Also, anyone who harbours a belief that inbreeding Germans would provide world leadership should read the extraordinary story of Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, and her Jew-hating husband.
So, no Europe and no America; Welcome to the new world disorder. The yawn-inducing leftist mantra that India and China are poised to provide the victorious historians of the future is beginning to look like a tale told by an idiot. While I would be amused to see the left’s reaction to Chinese hegemony – it is your human right to be run over by a tank – China looks increasingly like an infrastructural Ponzi scheme, while India’s economic prowess seems to revolve around its undoubted position as the world’s biggest call centre.
The appropriate word is appropriately German; Schadenfreude. The arrogance of the European gauleiters and their train-carrying MSM courtiers has been breathtaking. I think my favourite example of sheer brass neck was the attempt to make criticism of the EU tantamount to blasphemy. Where does one begin with this kind of designer totalitarianism?
The EU has not had its accounts signed off for 16 years. What company would survive this cankerous fiscal mismanagement? The EU and its proponents have attempted to graft political union onto a currency whose most attractive feature is the prettiness of its banknotes. Countries are required to keep voting in referenda until they come up with the correct, affirmative answer. Has there ever been such an anti-democratic exercise?
Possibly the most disturbing element of this whole Franco-German farce is the collusion of the media, particularly our own version of Pravda, the BBC. The provisional wing of the EU, the European media have never flagged in their sponsorship of this grande guignol stupidity. Only independent bloggers – unpaid and derecognised by the MSM – have spoken out against Europe. Richard North and Christopher Booker were telling the world in 2003 that Europe would end as a busted flush. No one in the MSM listened. If these gentlemen have any horse racing tips, I’m listening.
Memo to Barroso, Sarkozy, Merkel and all the other Euro fanatics. The people of Europe – the real people, not your vain and self-regarding set – neither want nor need your mildly fascist gentleman’s club. Leave us alone. We can trade with one another, visit and enjoy one another’s countries and traditions, exist as countries with our own sovereign right to exist, and probably produce accounts which would not interest the police.
I’m no little Englander. I’ve always sought to avoid those saloon-bar bores who twine on about their own country in much the same way as I’d eschew the company of those parents who speak with love in their eyes of their brattish, snivelling, witless children. Obsessive nationalists belong on the intellectual terraces. But better a modest northern trading nation – if we still have the ability to trade – then a building block in a grey European council estate. It’s always been axiomatic to me that the whole point of corrosive EU laws has been to hobble Britain to the point that we have to beg for permission to join the European folly.
The game has changed. Whether you consider yourself a creature of the political left or of the right is now about as relevant as whether you consider yourself to be a Platonist or an Aristotelean. It is now ‘about’ [as the politicians love to say] the political class and their MSM catamites, and the rest of us. To paraphrase Engels, the EU, thankfully, should be placed in "the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe".