Ode to Joy? Get Lost!

It’s forty years now since Britain joined the European Union, the proudest achievement of Edward Heath, a former Conservative prime minister.  It’s almost forty years since the people last had a say on the matter, deciding that we should stay in on the ‘better terms’ negotiated by Harold Wilson, a former Labour prime minister. 

Let’s be frank: we were deceived, our people were deceived by lying politicians, people like Heath and Wilson, whom I consider…  Hmm, I was going to write little better than traitors.  But that’s far too mealy-mouthed.  They were traitors.  I would dearly love to see Heath exhumed and his head placed on a spike a la Oliver Cromwell.  For good measure the head of Tony Blair should be placed alongside for company.  Oh, this is me in my seventeenth century mood.  The past is a foreign country; they did things better there. 

Before Christmas the Economist published an article warning of the dangers of leaving the Club.  I love the Economist.  I subscribe to the Economist, conceivably the dullest publication on the planet.  What?  Why read a publication that I consider dull?  Simply because it is a perfect reverse indicator, almost invariably getting things wrong.  I know what to think by not thinking like the hacks of the Economist! 

Look at Europe, look at the disaster of the European Union, a vanity project that may very well pull us all down unless we get out and get out soon.  I personally consider the Club to be the greatest danger England has ever faced to its integrity as a nation, greater than all the tyrants of history; greater than Philip II, greater than Napoleon and greater than Hitler.  In my more negative mood I take the view that we made the wrong decision in 1939 in going to war with Germany.  Hitler can have Poland, he can have France and he can have the rest of Europe.  Fog in Channel; Continent isolated – is there any better headline? 

So, yes, I’m a little Englander; I really do not care to refute the rebuke.  I would rather that than a citizen of the ghastly European super state, a monster conceived in the mind of lying politicians and mendacious bureaucrats.  What a stupid bunch they are.  How can they not be stupid, those who embraced the euro, the one size fits all currency? 

Look at the consequences; look at Greece, look at Italy, look at Ireland, look at Spain.  Yes, look at Spain, a country with the highest unemployment rate on the Continent, a country shackled to a high value artificial currency.  It amazes me that people are not angrier over the depth of the deception.  How some must look back to Franco with nostalgia.  He at least was jealous over the integrity of his country. 

I once thought that I might go in to politics.  Not any longer.  My contempt for the profession grows deeper by the day.  It really does not mater what the important issues are, the issues that most concern the people, whether it is over immigration or Europe or whatever; the politicians will simply perform their usual conjuring act. 

Democracy is a fraud, a periodic carnival of electoral choice which makes no difference at all to those who have already made up their minds.  I look at Cameron, I look at Clegg, I look at Miliband and I really cannot tell which is which.  Here I am reminded of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.  I am one of the creatures outside the window, Benjamin the donkey for preference.  I look from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but it is impossible to say which is which. 

The simple truth is we are not ‘Europeans’ at all.  We are not like them; we will never be like them.  Most of the Continental nations have a slave mentality, something their history shows time and time again.  They are suited to being governed by autocrats, dictators and bureaucrats; they know no better.  We do.  Our history is the history of freedom, of striving for ever greater forms of autonomy.  The EU is suffocating our past and our traditions. 

Only Margaret Thatcher, far too honest to be a politician, eventually understood what Europe entailed.  Of the whole benighted scheme she wrote;

That such an unnecessary and irrational project as building a European super-state was ever embarked on will seem in future years to be perhaps the greatest folly of the modern era. And that Britain…should ever have become part of it will appear a political error of the first magnitude.

She was destroyed for her honesty, destroyed by the like of the reptilian Michael Heseltine and his allies, such a parcel of rogues in a party.  Is there any wonder that the predominant emotion that people have over politicians is one of outright contempt? 

I loath Beethoven, I loathe Schiller, I loathe the Ode to Joy, yet another consequence of the EU.  I loathe the memory of Heath; I loathe all who betrayed this nation.  This is no longer a question of political preference.  It’s something altogether more visceral.  So far as I am concerned Europe can sink, the quicker the better.  And it can take its blue star flag along with it.  

Lessons of History

Everything in history occurs twice, so said Hegel and Marx.  Actually history very rarely repeats itself, at least not in the way we expect.  One would be wise not to read the lessons of history because the lessons are invariably wrong. 

After the Second World War the politicians and bureaucrats, washed up on the shores of a European desert, thought that the best thing to do was escape from the past; to escape, as they perceived it, from the nationalism that had brought the Continent so low. 

Out of the ashes arose a new phoenix - the European Community, carrying on the wing the ideal of a more perfect union.  It was nothing of the kind; it was an arrogant fantasy from the outset, one that sought to turn a geographical expression into a political reality.  Nationalism, like a wicked genie, was forced into a bottle.  Latterly democracy, an embarrassment for the Euro elite, was likewise being forced into a bottle, but both have burst forth in springtime of anger. 

My attention was drawn to an article by Ed West in the Telegraph recently, with a particularly apt headline – Europe’s post-Nazi stress disorder has brought it to ruin.  It’s a timely reminder of the realities of history and the blindness of the architects of the grand illusion.  The military historian Anthony Beevor is quoted, airing the obvious;

The great European dream was to diminish militant nationalism. We would all be happy Europeans together. But we are going to see the old monster of militant nationalism being awoken when people realise how little control their politicians have. We are already seeing political disintegration in Europe.

In that same article a panicky open letter published in the Guardian is also quoted, written in the dawn of Golden Dawn, the fascist heavy metal brigade which is on the threshold of entering the Greek parliament.  It was headed We are all Greek Jews now, presumably meaning the readers of the Guardian and not the Golden Boys:

We invite all citizens, political parties, unions, civil society, intellectuals and artists to fight the extreme right by promoting and bringing to life the European dream. We must always remember that this dream was built on the ruins of Nazism. We must never forget about the Shoah. Our dream is of a continent free from racism and anti-Semitism. It is the project of a society based on "togetherness" – beyond boundaries.

Second, we must refute the dogma of "the European fortress", which favours the spread of anti-immigrant speeches and the lockdown of Europe's frontiers, especially when a core element of European post-war identity – its social welfare system – requires the economic input of immigration to remain sustainable.

Actually it’s this sort of meretricious rubbish that is responsible for the present malaise.  The authors simply cannot see that it was the attempt to promote and bring to life ‘the European dream’ which has turned out to be a European nightmare.  Yes, a nightmare, of nations and peoples with wholly different traditions and widely different economies being moulded into One.  The people of the Continent were kidnapped by Procrustes, who proceeded to cut or stretch them into shape.  Rather appropriate, don’t you agree, that a figure from Greek mythology, should serve as the supreme European architect? 

One Golden Dawn does not make a Nazi summer.  It’s the ignorance that strikes me, the utter incomprehension.  It would seem that the only way of guarding against the past is the ‘European ideal’, the only way of guarding Europeans against themselves.  But, as West rightly says, the ‘European ideal’ is not failing because of a collection of laughable Greek heavies; it’s failing because as a vision it’s totally unworkable.  It could only work in the absence of democracy, by new forms of centralised tyranny that the ‘European idea’ was set up to guard against.  Ah, there’s the rub, there’s the paradox. 

A Europe where centuries of difference and inherited tradition were conjured into nothingness, a Europe where uncontrolled immigration has threatened the livelihood and identity of its indigenous peoples, was heading sooner or later for a great fall, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men won’t put it back together again. 

Did you note that point by the Guardianistas about social welfare systems?  No, I don’t understand what they are on about either, unless they mean that it is a sign of economic vibrancy for a country to attract hordes of foreign welfare claimants.  The irony is that their dream of a Continent of unrestricted movement, without boundaries, a Continent of ‘togetherness’ is the very thing that has increased anti-Semitism and racism of all kinds.  When people are ignored, when their concerns are ignored, marginal views begin to move in from the cold. 

West mentions his grandfather, who fought in the Second World War.  Both of mine did, one in the Far East and the other in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean.  They had a clear idea of what they were fighting for; they had a clear idea of what was right and what was wrong.  West writes of his grandfather “I suspect that, were he to see Britain and Europe today, he would conclude that it was in the grips of collective insanity.”

I don’t suspect; I simply know all of my grandparents would be horrified by the direction that our history has taken; horrified by the insanity that grips contemporary Europe, as bad as past insanity, only different.  That’s the lesson of history.  

The House of European Lies

When did European history begin, do you think? It’s not so easy to answer, is it? There are a number of points of departure. We could, I suppose, alight on Bronze Age Greece, recalled in the epics of Homer. It's as good a starting point as any. Wrong! European history began in 1946! Yes, it did, at least it did according to the idiots behind the House of European History, a massively expensive vanity project being promoted by the European Parliament.

European history began in 1946. When I read about this in the press recently not only could I not stop laughing but Annus Mirabilis immediately came to mind, a poem by Philip Larkin which opens with the following verse;

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

European history began in nineteen forty-six (which is rather late for me) between the end of World War Two and the rise of Sarkozeee!

So, why 1946, you may wonder? Simply because the various governments that make up the EU can’t agree on what went before. They can’t agree, above all, on the course of the Second World War, which among enthusiasts is risibly referred to as the ‘European Civil War.’ Ah, yes, the ‘European Civil War’ in which the Americans, the Russians (not all Europeans), the Canadians, the Australians and many other non-European nations were silly enough to get involved!

Apparently this project goes hand in hand with a Franco-German proposal to create a “European History Book,” to be used in all schools across the EU in order to “foster a common cultural identity.” Like hell it will. It will be an exercise in dissimulation and evasion, an avoidance of inconvenient truths and facts that dare not speak their name.

Metternich once said that Italy was only a geographical expression. If that is true of a country that still shows deep political and cultural fissures a hundred and fifty years after the Risorgimento, a process which brought superficial unity, it is doubly true of Europe. Beyond living on the same continent we, in England, have very little in common with the other nations of Europe. Our history is unique; we show little of the slave mentality that was such a feature of the pasts of so many of our neighbours.

I might argue that there is something deeply sinister about the whole Museum of European History project, something Orwellian along the lines of the Ministry of Truth, where the past will continually be rewritten in the light of Big Brother’s perceptions. It won’t be about objectivity and historical truth but anodyne propaganda. Yes, I could argue that there are sinister motives here but the whole thing is far too banal for that particular spin.

This House of Euro Cards is scheduled to open in Brussels in 2014. In a way it’s a sign of the Nero-like blindness of the Eurorats, singing in a vacuum while Greece and much of the rest of southern Europe burns. Does anyone in this country want this narcissistic project? Want it or not it will cost British taxpayers alone £19million, that’s around $30million.

It’s just another example of the massive waste that is such a feature of an organisation that exercises power without responsibility, the prerogative, as was once said, of the harlot throughout history. Yes, that’s another way of looking at the European Commission, a massively expensive mistress, a sort of Madame Pompadour, kept by the various governments of European Union, who have continually ignored or sidestepped the wishes of their own people, the people from whom the largesse is ultimately drawn.

There are lessons in this for those who care to look, lessons for the French particularly in the decline and fall of the Bourbon monarchy. Ah, but that demands looking at history objectively, not through a prism of self-deception.

There is a madness here that’s almost impossible to fathom, recklessness in the face of political reality, a wilful waste of money in the midst of the deepest economic crisis in decades. The decadence is such to recall the twilight of the last Roman Empire. I guarantee that is something else that will be airbrushed out of the House of European Lies.

Traces in time

I mentioned yesterday that we have the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1911, with three supplementary volumes appearing in the early 1920s. It’s been in our family now for close on a hundred years, bought by my great-great-grandfather just before the First World War.

It’s so intriguing, not at all like the modern day Britannica, which consists mostly of dictionary-length entries, hors d'oeuvres that never satisfy the appetite. The eleventh in contrast has lengthy articles, often by the leading experts of the day. Where else, I wonder, could one find a collection that contains submissions by people as diverse as Leon Trotsky and Harry Houdini?

I spent hours dipping into it in the past, following trails, dreaming in the company of serendipity. Clearly a lot of the information is obsolete, superseded by later scholarship, but its real value is that it has, in itself, become a fascinating historical document, reflecting many of the preoccupations and concerns of the day. Things that occupied a significant place in Edwardian consciousness have now diminished to mere footnotes in history. I’m thinking specifically here of the 1897 war between Greece and Turkey, to which several pages are devoted.

It’s the old pull-out maps that I love most, maps that reflect the political geography of the day. There is a wonderful one of Europe before the Balkan Wars, with the Ottoman Empire still stretching from the Black Sea to the Adriatic. The Germany Empire stands proud in the centre of the Continent, France seemingly deprived of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine forever. To the south is the land of the Habsburgs. Look to the east: there is the Empire of the Tsars; there is no Poland, no Finland and no Baltic States. It truly is like coming across the outlines of a vanished civilization, the highways where people went and can never come again.

Bashing Boney

What was the most important factor in the downfall of Napoleon? Why, an impossible obsession. After the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, realising that he would never be able to defeat England by a war at sea, he decided that he would have to resort to a new kind of war on land; an economic war.

By the Continental System he hoped to destroy British trade and manufacturing. But the Continental System was hopelessly ambitious. It required control, and absolute control, of the whole of Europe, from Lisbon to Moscow. It required all powers, all territories, all dependencies, all allies, no matter how reluctant, to fall in behind what was effectively a French economic dictatorship. Bit by bit the whole impossible project came apart. Portugal was the first to break rank, beginning the French tyrant's ruinous involvement in the Peninsula. Next to go was Russia, the ally of occasion.

To bring Tsar Alexander I back into line Napoleon broke the first rule of warfare-never march on Moscow. Russia's success in defeating French aggression also freed Austria and Prussia from the grip of the Continental System, enabling them all to join together in the War of the Sixth Coalition. Abandoned on almost all sides, Napoleon was overwhelmed at the Battle of the Nations.

How did his economic blockade affect the British? Hardly at all; for new markets were found in the Americas. Besides, smuggling into Europe was highly effective. More than that, Napoleon was forced to grant exceptions to his Berlin and Milan decrees, for the simple reason that he depended on British manufacturers for the supply of his army's boots! Contrary to Napoleon's intentions, moreover, such economic hardship as there was came in his own country, with food shortages, loss of business and high prices adding to his growing unpopularity. And that is how the mighty are fallen!

It's Time to Forgive Metternich

Don’t you agree? Oh, how could I possibly suggest such a thing, how is it possible to forgive the bête noir of late nineteenth century European Liberalism? Well, let me tell you how; let me take you back to the world of the old lost Habsburg Empire, the world that Metternich, in what was ultimately to be a hopeless endevour, tried to preserve.

In 1809, when Metternich was appointed foreign minister, the Empire, long a stable force in central Europe, was close to extinction. Napoleon was carrying ‘freedom’ across the Continent, which in practical terms meant new forms of tyranny, imperialism and political adventurism. Perhaps the old Europe, still burdened with the Gothic ruins of the Holy Roman Empire, really was obsolete; but was a new Europe to be shaped by an ego-manic, driven but the most ruthless forms of ambition ever seen in the world to date? Metternich used all of his energy to rescue Austria and, in the process, to rescue the Continent.

The Europe that emerged from the Congress of Vienna was a Europe free of the domination of a single power, but there was no return to the past: there was no true counter-revolution. More than that, the old-fashioned argument, and it is old-fashioned, hopelessly so, that this ‘new order’ was enforced by an oppressive state apparatus is quite wrong. The Carlsbad Decrees were more than a form of wishful thinking than a basis for practical policy. If one compares the police system with what was to come the following century, when the fires that Metternich tried to contain burned without restraint; even if one compares it with the police system of Napoleon, then it turns almost on the benign. As for the oppression of freedom, that much abused battle cry, consider Metternich’s own words, drawn from his Political Testament;

To me the word freedom has not the value of a starting-point, but of an actual goal to be striven for. The word order designates the starting-point. It is only on order that freedom can be based. Without order as a foundation the cry for freedom is nothing more than the endeavour of some party or other for an end it has in view. When actually carried out in practice, that cry for freedom will inevitably express itself in tyranny. At all times and in all situations I was a man of order, yet my endeavour was always for true and not for pretended liberty.

Was he wrong? We can now look back, from the heights of a new century, on the 'age of party', the 'age of ideology', an age when abstract ends governed and justified horrific means.

Metternich was at the centre of an international order, the first serious attempt at such a structure in history, which aimed to preserve peace through congresses and mutual cooperation. It failed in the end because there were too many divergent interests; it failed, perhaps, because England disengaged from Europe in much the same fashion as the United States disengaged from the world a century later. Yes, it failed but it created a prolonged period of relative peace and stability. The tides of ‘freedom’ washed again in 1848 only to be broken on the walls of power. Thereafter liberalism, nationalism and power were, bit by bit, to reach an 'accomodation', so different from everything that Metternich conceived. It was the beginning, if you like, of a new 'unholy alliance.'

But the old Austria survived, greatly modified, especially after the disastrous war with Bismarck’s Prussia, but it survived until the great tragedy that beset the Continent after the murder at Sarajevo. It survived, in its late senescence, to give shape to one of the most brilliant and creative periods in history: the world of the Vienna cafes, the intellectual forcing-house of the new century; the world of Klimt and Schiele, of Freud and Zweig, selections from a list too tiresome to chronicle in full.

It was also a world where a certain failed Artist, a failed human being, seethed and hated, hopelessly locked into the shadows, dreaming of freedom. It even survived, if in reduced form, until a new tide of ‘freedom’ and nationalism came with the Artist in 1938, silencing the old, this time for good.

Think of Metternich, think of Austria, and then think of what followed. A giant, a true giant, is only ever measured by those who fall into his shadow.