Thomas Eakins Walt Whitman 1891
Jean Claude Juncker held a speech yesterday that had, oh irony, been labeled a State of the Union. A perfect way of showing how pompous Juncker and his surroundings have become. A perfect way, too, to point out how much the European Union differs from the United States. The gap is so wide it doesn’t need any explaining.
Much of the speech concerned the refugee crisis Juncker and his cronies share a lot of the blame for, and for good measure he managed to get in a vile threat to Greece, in the vein of “Greece must respect the bailout, or the EU reaction will be ‘different'”, and “Greece cannot be kept in the euro at all costs”. In Brussels, democracy is a word fast losing even the last shreds of its meaning.
Juncker’s a very boring speaker -when he’s not been drinking-, but that doesn’t take away from the message. Brussels seeks to use the refugee crisis for the same purpose it uses all crises for: power grabbing. A reaction from Nigel Farage that was dripping with vile bigotry was the best reaction I read about to the speech, and in my not so humble opinion that is desperately sad.
It’s a shame and a disgrace that bigots like Farage, Le Pen, Orban and Wilders will have to decide the future of the EU, but it’s still a mile and a half better than more EU, because the European Union is rapidly turning into a monstrosity the likes of which even Europe has seldom seen in its history, and that’s saying something.
28 separate formerly sovereign nations are coming under the thumb of a de facto occupying force that is squeezing their sovereignty and democracy out of them in boa constrictor fashion, leaving them behind as empty political shells. And every single one of these nations has voluntarily signed up for this treatment, blindly lured by financial promises that the Greek crisis has abundantly exposed as hollow and void.
Brussels has created another crisis. No, the refugee situation didn’t start last week and yes, the EU did nothing for months, other than shutting down Italy and Greece’s own refugee aid programs and replacing them with the very suspicious Frontex bureau.
And now this crisis is in full flight, what does Juncker call for? More EU, more Union. Which means more power moving to Brussels. This is an MO, not an unfortunate accident.
The Europe of Juncker, Merkel, Cameron and Hollande could and should have moved much faster on the refugee issue, and not have let thousands of people drown before coming up with the plan Juncker presented yesterday, which comes up way short of what will be needed, but which some Reuters editor still had the audacity to label ‘bold’.
A grand resettlement plan for 160,000 refugees makes no sense at all at a time that Germany alone will receive perhaps as much as a million refugees this year. The best thing about the plan may turn out to be the compulsory character Juncker seeks to give it, complete with sanctions for countries that refuse to be told by him what to do.
Even better, obviously, is the fully braindead idea of letting countries pay NOT to accept refugees. Once you start translating human misery into monetary terms, your only possible future looks excruciatingly bleak.
But it will be a spectacle to watch, Brussels dictating terms on sovereign countries, or countries that still think they are sovereign at least.
Brussels succeeded in getting all EU nations to gang up on Greece earlier this year, and countries that are non-compliant on the refugee issue are going to receive death threats like the ones Greece received, but the 27-to-1 majority that existed in that case will not repeat itself.
There is not much difference in depth of bigotry and opportunism between Juncker, Farage and Le Pen. So perhaps it’s only fitting that they get to fight to secure the end of the grandiosely ill-conceived pan-European project amongst themselves. There are no other voices left, no reason, no moderation, no common sense.
Europe’s left is all but dead from largely self-inflicted wounds, set in motion by the likes of Tony Blair. That leaves just one voice, that of the sociopaths, the type of individual overly large institutions select for by default.
If Brussels and Juncker have their way, the EU is going to turn Europe into a -perhaps guerrilla- warzone, of occupiers and occupied battling for power. If the European Union is dissolved, the sovereign nations that remain behind may yet have a -fighting- chance.
The refugee crisis has shown us, and in rich colors, that there are still a lot of decent people in Europe. The problem is that they have no political voice. The dissolution of the Union may be the best -if not only- way to return that voice to them.
Separate sovereign countries with decision making and accountability on a smaller and therefore more human scale are much less likely to draw sociopaths into leading positions.
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