Our beloved EU joins other worthy winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, such as:
Willi Brandt, for his tireless attempts to turn West Germany into a Soviet protectorate.
Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, for delivering South Vietnam to the communist North.
Desmond Tutu, for sharing his name with a skirt.
Mikhail Gorbachev, for murdering merely hundreds and not millions, as he could have done.
Yasser Arafat, for limiting himself to non-nuclear terrorism.
Kofi Annan, for leading an organisation that makes the world such a safe and peaceful place.
Al Gore, for lying about global warming and thereby preventing a global war or an unidentified something that would have been even worse.
Barack Obama, for being the best half-black US president in history and having an all-black wife who loves him to distraction at every Democratic Party conference.
Now the EU has been rewarded ‘for having over six decades contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe’. No progressive person could possibly argue with the general sentiment, though a pedant may take exception to the arithmetic. After all, the EU qua EU was only formed in 1992, which by my calculation makes it two rather than six decades ago. But what is a few years here or there among friends?
As to the rest of it, nothing could be fairer. We all know that it is only thanks to the EU that Belgium has so far been prevented from acting on its dastardly aggressive plans towards Norway. But for the EU, Denmark would have attacked Italy long ago. And it is only due to the EU’s vigilance that Luxembourg has not yet annexed Sweden, or indeed vice versa.
Nor can the EU’s wholehearted commitment to promoting democracy be questioned by anyone who gets out of the rut of facile thinking to ponder the very essence of democracy, not just its visible paraphernalia. For the EU not only welcomes its members to cast a free vote on every constitutional change but it actually protects the voters from making hasty and ill-considered decisions. Should a country undermine the very idea of democracy by casting a wrong vote, the EU can be relied upon to give the underachiever a second chance to get it right – a bit like our GCSE exams.
Thus preventing democracy from failing, the EU not only contributes to its advances but effectively corrects the congenital flaws of this system of government. Moreover, the EU selflessly transfers the same principle to its members’ internal politics. For no one can deny that unchecked democracy has been known to elevate to leadership manifestly undeserving people. The EU provides the necessary checks by replacing inadequately elected leaders with its own appointees, thus preventing democracy from appearing compromised in the eyes of the world.
Nor is the EU’s commitment to human rights in any doubt. Realising that few countries in the world enjoy the same human rights as Western Europe, the EU has made it possible for their nationals to settle in any European country and in any numbers. In the process, the EU has corrected the potentially dangerous religious misbalance in its member countries by making sure most new arrivals espouse Islam and not Christianity. If this is not the cornerstone of a lasting peace, one hesitates to suggest what is.
It is only thanks to the EU that Germany has suppressed its innate urge to attack France every now and then. One can only fume at suggestions, irresponsibly put forth by some, that the real reason could have been the fact that, after her previous attempt to unite Europe, Germany was practically disarmed and had NATO troops stationed on her territory. Yet those same people praise German ingenuity in the same breath. How then can they fail to see that, but for the EU, the Germans would have found a way of using bayonets to defeat France’s nuclear arsenal.
Before the Soviet Union broke up into peaceful and democratic states, it was the EU that prevented it from conquering Europe. It is a fallacy to believe that the American nuclear umbrella had anything to do with this. In fact it is only thanks to the resolute stance adopted by the EU that the USA refrained from launching a first strike against the Soviet Union, thereby plunging the world into a nuclear winter (not to be confused with the Arab Spring).
Yes, one has to admit sorrowfully that there are still some nay-sayers who use words like ‘idiotic’ and ‘cretinous’ to describe the well-merited award. They point out – spuriously! – that Spain is about to be torn asunder, the Greeks wear Nazi uniforms to irritate Frau Merkel, the usual quota of cars are being burned around Paris by people newly endowed with human rights, the North and South of Italy are a hair breadth away from jumping on each other’s throats, demonstrations all over Europe are getting more and more frequent and violent, troops of various EU members are fighting silly wars in the Middle East and trying to get into a few more.
Little do these misguided individuals realise that all such developments point at the violent nature of Europeans, with the possible exception of those who sit on the Nobel Committee. So much more must we praise the EU for having prevented for some two to six decades such homicidal tendencies from bursting out into another World War.
I, along with the entire progressive mankind, applaud the EU for its unique achievements. My only regret is that this peace-saving organisation has so far been denied the Nobel Prize for economics, which it deserves at least as much.