Defying Euclid and vindicating Lobachevsky, parallels can converge, especially those drawn by Remainers between the EU and just about anything else. The point of convergence is feeble, spurious nonsense.
Yesterday I spoke about the frequent analogies imagined between the EU and the Holy Roman Empire or the USA; today Niall Ferguson, representing the neocons, has ploughed in with his professional knack at seeing parallels where none exist.
The historian will doubtless object that he speaks for himself only. But neocons, of whom he’s one, hardly ever do. Everything they write sounds as if it reflects what the Soviets called ‘the general line’.
In my book Democracy as a Neocon Trick, I even coined the term Collective Neocon, COLLENE for short, refusing to attribute numerous quotations from their books because they all say the same things the same way.
One fundamental thing about the neocons is that they’ve never shaken their Trotskyist heritage. They’ve only shifted the same radical animus from Trotsky’s ‘permanent communist revolution’ to a permanent war to promote Democracy (always implicitly capitalised).
It’s to them that we largely owe the criminal 2003 attack on Iraq, which has invigorated the Muslims’ present orgy of violence (not that they needed much invigorating). The neocons use Democracy the same way Trotsky used Communism, as a slogan to inscribe on the banners of incessant war.
That’s why, even though they insist on calling themselves neo-conservatives, they have to be out and out statists. Their cherished crusade for a particular political form (divorced in their minds from any content underneath) can only be undertaken by the state. To be able to do that, the state has to grow pari passu with the scale of global ambitions.
Since any one particular state has natural limits to its expansion, the neocons have to support the notion of a giant supranational state, ideally governed by America. The EU is seen as an essential intermediate step on the road to such unification.
That’s why American neocons, which Ferguson has become, if only by co-option, tend to be fans of the EU. British neocons, even if they don’t move to America, are all bound by the unspoken party discipline too. Therefore they’re all American patriots, and it takes a reader of their books no time to realise that their ‘we’ doesn’t refer to Britain.
Most of them also support the EU, although dissent occurs more often in their ranks than in those of their US Parteigenossen: transferring British sovereignty to the tender care of the EU is a more vital issue in London than in New York.
Since Ferguson is now firmly ensconced in the States, he has no such limitations. Hence in the run-up to the referendum he wrote articles like Fog in Channel: Brexiteers Isolated from Britain’s Duty to Save Europe and Brexit’s Happy Morons Don’t give a Damn About the Costs of Leaving, all filled with vituperative diatribes, masking the crepuscular thinking in the background.
(Britain did her part in saving Europe back in the 1940s. Now it’s Europe’s turn to save itself, and the EU isn’t the way to go about it. But of course what Ferguson means is the same old crusade for Democracy for which his neocon heart aches.)
Then six months after the referendum he changed his tune, while continuing to sing off-key. “My mistake,” Ferguson wrote, “was uncritically defending Cameron and Osborne instead of listening to people in pubs. Issue was not GDP but future migration.”
The issue was neither GDP nor even future migration, but political sovereignty. All else is strictly derivative, something that’s too simple for Ferguson to understand. But notice the sly dig at those who do understand that: they’re all pub crawlers, not a patch on superior intellects like Cameron, Osborne and, by association, Ferguson.
Now he’s back, bringing his professional credentials to bear on the issue of the supposedly awful cost of leaving the EU.
First Ferguson credits himself with having been the first to compare Brexit to a divorce, a trite simile if I’ve ever seen one. Now, he says, divorce doesn’t even begin to describe it.
It’s a schism “recalling as it does the great division between western and eastern Christianity in 1054, as well as the period between 1378 and 1417 when there were rival popes in Rome and Avignon. The defining characteristic of schisms is that they are drawn-out and bitter – and the more arcane the points at issue (such as… the precise wording of the Nicene Creed), the deeper the schism becomes.”
I’m amazed he didn’t compare Britain to Luther nailing his Ninety-five Theses to the door of that Wittenberg church in 1517.
As an aside, the ‘arcane’ point at issue in 1054 was about the nature of the Trinity, which, next to the divinity of Christ, is perhaps the most critical point of Christian doctrine – but hey, ours is an age of specialisation, and Ferguson is an historian, not a theologian.
As to the rest of it, comparing Britain’s desire to regain her ancient constitution to a religious schism is vulgar stupidity at its most soaring. The EU isn’t a religion. It’s a wicked political contrivance based entirely on secular aspirations.
A more exact (if still not exhaustive) parallel was Britain resisting further European integration in 1940, during Germany’s previous attempt to unite the continent under its aegis. No price was seen as too big then, and no price is too big now.
I shan’t bore you with repeating Ferguson’s musings: you can read them in today’s Times. The gist is that Brexit will cost us a lot of money – not the destroyed cities or thousands of lives Britain suffered in 1940.
Uninteresting if true. The issue is that of principle, morality and intellectual integrity (all those things the neocons know about only by hearsay), not of a few billion here or there.
If HMG plays the card dealt by the referendum with intelligence and resolve, we won’t suffer any horrendous economic consequences, quite the opposite. We should just resist the EU blackmail with the same staunch spirit as that evinced during the Blitz.
Contrary to what the likes of Juncker, Tusk – and Ferguson – claim, we can negotiate from a position of strength, as one of only two nuclear powers in Western Europe, a lynchpin of European security and an irreplaceable market for European goods.
But even if regaining our ancient constitution does cost us money, it’s a price eminently worth paying. Really, Ferguson ought to continue peddling his wares to credulous Americans and leave us alone.
“It’s to them that we largely owe the criminal 2003 attack on Iraq, which has invigorated the Muslims’ present orgy of violence (not that they needed much invigorating).”
Correct. The Bible describes the sons of Ishmael [Arabs] as troublesome and quarrelsome, living among their brother [dwelling in clans]. Violence and warfare is the way of life. Even without the “interventions” of the western powers.
The emissions of Tusker & Co are not only threats to discourage us but are also intended to discourage other countries from leaving the EU. They are counter productive needless to say.