Sigmar Gabriel, the German foreign minister, is obviously not a very intelligent man – this goes without saying in a modern politician.
Modern governments can no more attract people endowed with intellectual rigour and integrity than an abattoir can attract vegetarians. To be sure, some politicians may have high IQs, but IQ measures not intelligence, but the potential to develop it.
Today’s governments are staffed with people who’ve left that potential unrealised, developing instead other qualities that are indeed essential for their profession: duplicity, perfidy, unscrupulousness and the ability to do whatever it takes to manipulate blocs of voters.
That being the case, when a politician utters a manifestly false statement it’s hard to say whether he does so because he’s mentally deficient, half-educated (at best) or dishonest. Most likely, all such qualities come together to form a homogeneous cocktail, where the individual ingredients are no longer distinguishable.
Herr Gabriel is a case in point. Speaking at the Passchendaele memorial service, he repeated the transparent lie peddled by all EU fans. The EU, he said, is “more than the single market”.
That much is true. It’s a giant political con designed to create a single tyrannical European state run by Germany, with her rear brought up by a neo-Vichy France. The single market is but a means to that end.
But that’s not how Gabriel meant it. He meant that it’s because of the EU that Europe has been spared “war and destruction” for 70 years: “Europe is a project of peace. Europe is our future. Only united can we succeed in protecting our interests and defending our values.”
The statement is mendacious on several levels, including factual. When German or French politicians say there have been no wars in Europe since 1945, they mean no wars between Germany and France.
This is an indirect proof of how the EU cookie really crumbles: all those Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Kosovars, Georgians and Ukrainians dying in their thousands simply don’t count. And as to the absence of an all-European war, the only threat of it since 1945 has come from Russia, and that threat has been kept in check not by the EU, but by Nato, mainly by the American nuclear umbrella.
It would be tedious to discuss such obvious facts at length. Suffice it to say that crediting the EU with preventing another world war takes either stupidity and ignorance, or else cynical (and probably justified) certainty that the dumbed-down masses will swallow any canard shoved down their throats.
As to “our values”, what would they be? Christian Europe was indeed united, brought together by dynastic ties and above all the Church. The guiding principle was “in necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas” (in necessary things, unity; in doubtful things, liberty; in all things, charity.)
It was the Church that was a factor of unity, and it was a sustained attack on the Church, adumbrated by the Renaissance, gathering speed with the Reformation and spinning out of control with that gross misnomer, the Enlightenment, that fractured European unity, bringing about the materialistic, progressivist and bloodthirsty modernity.
The third modifier naturally flows out of the first two: the newly hatched ‘enlightened European values’ combined to kill more people in the first wholly atheistic century, the twentieth, than in all the other centuries of recorded history combined. And it can be confidently predicted that the technological progress of which we’re supposed to be so proud will enable the twenty-first century to outscore its predecessor.
Another shameless lie flogged widely is that ‘our values’ are the same as those of Christendom: one hears all sorts of ignoramuses brazenly equating the EU with the Holy Roman Empire. In fact, they’re the same ‘values’ that produced the twentieth-century carnage, including the battle of Passchendaele, in which 500,000 had to die on both sides for the Allies to advance five miles.
All the political systems of modernity, including democracy, communism, fascism and national or international socialism, share the same ‘values’. They only differ in the methods they use to uphold and perpetuate them, and in the relative importance they assign to each.
All of them subordinate the individual to a vast collective entity, be it arithmetic majority, the largest class or the dominant race. They’ve all replaced aristocratic culture with that of the urban bourgeoisie, the lower reaches of it. They’ve all marginalised the Church. They’re all technocratic. They all enforce the primacy of the state over parents in children’s education. They’re all centralised. They all define their millenarian utopia in materialistic terms. They’re all atheist and utilitarian. They all promote a cult of mediocrity, to the accompaniment of assorted ‘fanfares for the common man’. They’re all anthropocentric. They all strive for uniformity, formed by ignorant popular tastes in everything, from art to food. They can all conscript the whole population at the drop of a hat (which fact contributes more than do technological advances to the apocalyptic body count of modern wars).
These are the ‘values’ that have destroyed history’s greatest civilisation, having produced instead so many ugly contrivances, such as Western ‘democracies’, Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany – and the EU.
It takes a combination of idiocy, cynicism and effrontery to tout such ‘values’ as a factor of lasting peace. In other words, it takes men like Sigmar Gabriel and his fellow EU shills, ably supported on the other side of the Atlantic by the neocons.
“it’s because of the EU that Europe has been spared ‘war and destruction’ for 70 years”
Sorry Mr. German. It was the U.S. military and presence of atomic weapons and the threat to use same that kept the peace in Europe for seventy years. Everyone knows this.