A new piece by the great European essayist Fjordman.
At the EU Observer, Anthony Coughlan, a senior lecturer at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, notes that in every EU member state at present the majority of laws come from Brussels. Why do national politicians and representatives accept this situation? He suggests a plausible explanation:
"At national level when a minister wants to get something done, he or she must have the backing of the prime minister, must have the agreement of the minister for finance if it means spending money, and above all must have majority support in the national parliament, and implicitly amongst voters in the country. Shift the policy area in question to the supranational level of Brussels however, where laws are made primarily by the 27-member Council of Ministers, and the minister in question becomes a member of an oligarchy, a committee of lawmakers, the most powerful in history, making laws for 500 million Europeans, and irremovable as a group regardless of what it does.
"National parliaments and citizens lose power with every EU treaty, for they no longer have the final say in the policy areas concerned. Individual ministers on the other hand obtain an intoxicating increase in personal power, as they are transformed from members of the executive arm of government at national level, subordinate to a national legislature, into EU-wide legislators at the supranational."
EU ministers see themselves as political architects of a superpower in the making. By participating in the EU, they can also free themselves from scrutiny of their actions by elected national parliaments.
According to Coughlan, "the great bulk of European laws are never debated at council of minister level, but are formally rubber-stamped if agreement has been reached further down amongst the civil servants on the 300 council sub-committees or the 3,000 or so committees that are attached to the commission."
EU integration represents "a gradual coup by government executives against legislatures, and by politicians against the citizens who elect them." This process is now sucking the reality of power from "traditional government institutions, while leaving these still formally intact. They still keep their old names — parliament, government, supreme court — so that their citizens do not get too alarmed, but their classical functions have been transformed."
Tony Blair, in one of his final interviews as British PM, stated that "The British people are sensible enough to know that, even if they have a certain prejudice about Europe, they don't expect their government necessarily to share it or act upon it." In other words: The British people should be sensible enough to know that their government will ignore their wishes and interests if it deems this appropriate, as it frequently has in its immigration policies.
The European Union is basically an attempt – a rather successful one so far – by the elites in European nation states to cooperate on usurping power, bypassing and eventually abolishing the democratic system, a slow-motion coup d'état. Ideas such as "promoting peace" are used as a pretext for this, a bone to fool the gullible masses and veil what is essentially a naked power grab. It works because the national parliaments still appear to be functioning as before.
This is perhaps the most dangerous aspect of the EU: It is increasingly dictatorial, but it is a stealth dictatorship, whose most dangerous elements are largely invisible in everyday life. What the average person sees is that the EU makes it easier for him to travel to other countries without a passport, and use the same Euro currency from Arctic Lapland in Finland to Spain's Canary Islands off the African coast.
This appears convenient, and on some level it is. But it comes at the price of hollowing out the power of elected institutions and placing it into the hands of an unelected oligarchy conspiring to usurp ever more power and rearrange the lives of half a billion people without their consent. That's a steep price to pay for a common currency. But people do not clearly see this is their daily lives, and seeing is believing. The enemy that clearly identifies himself as such is sometimes less dangerous than the enemy who is diffused and vague, since you cannot easily mobilize against him.
Alexander Boot, a Russian by birth, left for the West in the 1970s, only to discover that the West he was seeking was no longer there. Boot believes that democracy, or in the words of Abraham Lincoln, the government of the people, by the people and for the people, has been replaced by glossocracy, the government of the word, by the word and for the word.
Glossocracy can be traced back at least to the slogan of the French Revolution in 1789, "Freedom, equality, brotherhood." As it turned out, this meant mass terror, martial law and authoritarian rule. The more meaningless the word, the more useful it is for glossocrats. This is why the notion of Multiculturalism has been so useful, since it sounds vaguely positive, but ambiguous and could be used to cover up vast changes implemented with little public debate. The impulse behind Political Correctness consists of twisting the language we use, enforcing new words or changing the meaning of old ones, turning them into "weapons of crowd control" by demonizing those who fail to comply with the new definitions. The European Union, a French-led enterprise, is currently the world's pre-eminent and most unadulterated glossocracy.
According to Boot, a dictator whose power is based on bullets is afraid of bullets. A glossocrat whose power is based on words is afraid of words. The EU has drawn up guidelines advising government spokesmen to use "non-offensive" phrases when talking about terrorism. The word Jihad should preferably not be used at all, or should be explained as a misunderstood term meaning peaceful struggle against oneself. These recommendations are being implemented. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, in an attempt to avoid offending Muslims, in the summer of 2007 banned his ministers from mentioning "Muslim" and "terrorism" in the same breath, following attempted terror attacks staged by Muslims - including several medical doctors - in Glasgow and London.
To quote Paul Fregosi's book Jihad in the West: "The Jihad, the Islamic so-called Holy War, has been a fact of life in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Near and Middle East for more than 1300 years, but this is the first history of the Muslim wars in Europe ever to be published. Hundreds of books, however, have appeared on its Christian counterpart, the Crusades, to which the Jihad is often compared, although they lasted less than two hundred years and unlike the Jihad, which is universal, were largely but not completely confined to the Holy Land. Moreover, the Crusades have been over for more than 700 years, while a Jihad is still going on in the world. The Jihad has been the most unrecorded and disregarded major event of history. It has, in fact, been largely ignored. For instance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica gives the Crusades eighty times more space than the Jihad."
At the same time as the memory of 1300 years of almost continuous Jihad warfare and Islamic aggression is gradually being erased from Western school textbooks, "Islamophobia" is being promoted as a serious challenge. By substituting "Jihad" with "Islamophobia," emphasis is moved from Europeans defending themselves against Islamic violence to innocent Muslims suffering from prejudice and racism. An alternate word thus creates an alternate reality.
Italian President Giorgio Napolitano, apparently afraid of what he perceives as growing opposition to the EU project, thinks Eurosceptics are "psychological terrorists." So, European leaders won't use the word "terrorist" about Muslims supporting suicide bombers, but they have finally found somebody deserving the label: Europeans who oppose the EU.
In a frank moment, Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg's PM, once described the EU's "system" in this way: "We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back." In The Economist, columnist Charlemagne writes: "What Mr Juncker and those who think like him are trying to do is, in essence, to drown opposition to European federation in a mass of technical detail, to bore people into submission. As a strategy, it has gone a long way. The greatest single transfer of sovereignty from Europe's nations to the European Union took place, in 1985, as part of the project to create a single European market. Even [British Conservative PM] Margaret Thatcher, not usually slow to spot a trick, later claimed that she had not fully appreciated the ramifications of what she was then signing up to."
In 2005 (and again in 2006), the EU's financial watchdog refused to approve the EU's accounts for the 11th year in a row because they were so full of fraud. The European Court of Auditors refused to give a statement of assurance on the EU's $160.3 billion budget for 2004. "The vast majority of the payment budget was again materially affected by errors of legality and regularity," it said. It specifically refused to approve the budgets for the EU's foreign policy and aid programs, many of which are geared towards Arab and Muslim countries. Half of the project budgets approved by the European Commission were inadequately monitored.
