If the European Union Were A Horse, It Would Be Shot!
By Peter Mills. It is perfectly legitimate historical observation to compare the European Union with Hitler’s Nazi empire (or, come to that, with Emperor Napoleon’s overactive egomania, but this is not so fresh in people’s memories).
No, my comparison is abstractly drawn from the unavoidable structuring of any multi-national empire. Forgetting the politics and nature of the regimes themselves, the Nazis at their height, the old Soviet Union, the present European Union, the United States of America up to and during its Civil War period and beyond, even the old British Empire – all of these “patchwork quilts” of different regional, ethnic, social and racial mixtures have one very significant thing in common, and this is today becoming increasingly evident in the case of Europe.
What all of these multicultural “empires” share is their own unavoidable internal instability. This instability is not so noticeable during the times of expansion and success, when everyone is riding high on the crest of a wave. However, there inevitably comes a critical point when a cascade collapse begins. A huge avalanche can start with a single loose pebble.
The lands of Napoleon, Hitler, the USSR and all other historical empires, even ancient Rome, can be shown by history to function brilliantly for as long as the leadership, or the ruling body, managed to achieve success after success. However, all of them without exception had the same inbuilt weakness, and the present European Empire is no exception to this fact. This weakness is, simply, that no empire’s progression from success to success can possibly continue indefinitely. And the bigger the empire, the bigger its fall.
Hitler’s empire came to grief when the odds assembled against him reached a critical point and success after success was suddenly replaced by failure after failure until the Nazi Empire was extinct.
The USSR came to grief when its population realized that the Western world was vastly better at just about everything than the Soviet Union, and the success after success proclaimed by the Soviet government was revealed almost overnight to actually be failure after failure.
The USA came to grief when the Government’s success overreached itself and alienated huge swathes of the Southern States, who resigned from the Nation and a dreadful civil war became that government’s greatest ever failure, echoes of which continued well into the 1960s – a century afterwards – when the unresolved issues of the Civil War were still producing race riots and mass deaths in Alabama and other southern areas.
Ancient Rome came to grief after it had conquered an immense empire with success after success and then collapsed from internal corruption and weakness and was destroyed by hordes of savage incoming invaders.
All of these historical precedents amply demonstrate the true fact that there is a very big difference between creating an empire successfully, and running it successfully.
Now – hopefully – we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the dreadful European Union from the same kind of underlying causes. Like all those other empires, today’s European State has been accomplishing success after success until, now, it has stumbled badly and is unable to keep the momentum of success moving forward. As the history of all other empires has proven, once the period of successive success ends, it is simply not possible for the huge, unwieldy structure to remain intact by just “treading water”.
An empire, by its very nature, can only do one of two things. It can continue in the march of success, or it can fail and collapse. It cannot for very long balance like an acrobat on the top of the pyramid. If it cannot keep on rising, it has only one direction left – plunging. Or, like a tightrope walker, as long as an empire can place one foot in front of the other, it can go forward and maintain its balance. If, on the other hand, it has to stop walking, even for a short time, it loses its balance and falls.
The European Union may not yet have completely stopped walking; but it is certainly stumbling, and there is little evidence that it can ever regain its previous successful state of balance. With any luck, future history will record the European Union as the shortest-lived empire of all, with the possible exception of the Nazi Empire which only lasted from 1933 until 1945. But then again, if the European Union is second only to the Nazi Empire, what does that say about the European Union?
The primary cause of the European Union’s stumbling is not simply the world financial meltdown. It is, rather, that in the face of this global currency crisis, the European Union is hopelessly out of its depth to cope with it in any meaningful way. The very structure, organization and administrative octopus of the EU which previously gave the union success after success is now acting against its ability even to face up to the catastrophic financial problems, let alone cobble together some kind of plan which stands a snowball’s chance in Hell of working. In a very real way, too many cooks are spoiling the broth!
Seventeen countries have joined what is called the Eurozone. That is, they have accepted the euro as their single legal tender and, consequently, their economy is no longer a national economy dependent upon the strength of the monetary condition of the individual country. Instead, the economic condition of all seventeen countries is irretrievably tied together in one great scheme within which each country is but a component part.
Joining the Eurozone, therefore, is an immense gamble, where one country is obliged to depend for its financial existence – and therefore for the well-being and continued future of its entire population – upon the success of other countries over whose industry and monetary abilities it has no input, no direct control, and no administrative representation.
Although a consortium of finance ministers – and if considered necessary in emergency situations, also presidents and prime-ministers – from each country jointly exercise the power of making political decisions upon financial matters within the Eurozone countries, forming what has become known as the “Euro Group,” the actual financial policy of the Eurozone is handled and established not by any democratically elected political body, but by the European Central Bank which is under the control of an (unelected by voters) bank president and an (unelected by voters) board comprising the chiefs of the national banks of member states.
This arrangement means that the Eurozone as an economic entity – a “financial super-state” – has no agreed and democratic financial representation, common authority, fiscal policy or single control mechanism, merely a group of politicians who decide what they would like to happen, and a separate group of professional bank governors who may or may not choose to comply with the particular political direction of the moment.
In effect, this chaotic and divided “management” structure means that each individual country in the Eurozone has placed the well being, livelihood, future development and standard of living of its own people entirely upon a giant roulette wheel being spun by dozens of hands divided broadly into two camps, politicians and bank managers, who frequently do not agree on how the roulette wheel should be spun, or how much should be placed as a gamble on each bet.
The nearest the European Union has so far managed to get towards running the “single currency” by a single intelligent system is in allowing a “peer review” whereby other member states may give their opinions – and only their opinions – on each other’s national budgets. The management of the entire European single financial system is therefore, at best, shambolic by nature.
This, unfortunately, also has a knock-on effect on countries outside the Eurozone, which includes Great Britain. The field of influence of the Euro has a ragged and largely uncontrolled boundary (for example, even the USA is affected by the threat of a Eurozone collapse). There are countries who use the Euro as their principle currency, but who have not contracted to make it their sole legal tender and thus remain outside the Eurozone, preferring to also retain their original national currency alongside the Euro. Some, like the Vatican (an independent country in its own right) and San Marino (like the Vatican, an independent state entirely surrounded by Italy) have achieved agreement with the European Union to tie themselves to the Euro, but to continue minting their own unique coinage and banknotes.
There are also ten other countries (Great Britain, Denmark, Sweden, Lithuania, Latvia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria) who, although members of the European Union, are not included in the Eurozone – that is, their national economies have not accepted the Euro as the single legal tender (for instance, Britain still retains the pound sterling as an independent currency). In Britain’s case, this fortunate circumstance came about through our resignation from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) as the result of what is now called “Black Wednesday” in 1992.
Although Britain had sensibly originally refused to join the ERM when it was established in 1979, in October 1990 the Chancellor of the Exchequer (later Prime Minister) John Major and Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd persuaded the government that it would be a wonderfully good idea if Britain joined the European ERM. One year and eleven months later on 16th September 1990 the government was obliged to extract the country from the ERM because we could not afford to raise the value of sterling, which due to disastrous economic policies had fallen below the minimum requirement of the ERM.
The cost of this whole episode to the country has been reliably given as £3.3 billion by a Freedom of Information request. Just one man alone – financial market dealer George Soros – made over US$1 billion quite legally by “short selling” British sterling, a complex process involving borrowing money from investors and speculators to buy huge amounts of a currency expected to fail and then selling it back to its national bank when its value has dropped, enabling the dealer to pay back the borrowed capital and keep the immense difference for their profit.
If further evidence of government’s inability to properly handle a national economy were needed, it has been shown that if the British (Tory) government at the time of the ERM debacle had been as savvy as financial trader George Soros, the treasury could have kept back some $24 billion of foreign currency reserves and, when the pound collapsed, could have actually ended up making a profit of £2.4 billion. Instead, the government chose to spend the reserves in a vain attempt to bolster the value of the pound.
Although these events are now history, they are a history of British government’s general desire to rush in to situations where even fools fear to tread, providing the sinking ship our politicians want us all to leap onto bears the sacred magic word “European”. They are a history of British government’s general incompetence in handling our national economy. With a track record such as this, they have, like the fabled Pied Piper, led the British population on a grotesque dance to national ruination. Are our politicians the fools – or are we the fools for continually electing such proven abject buffoons into power over us?
The British government is entranced and enraptured by anything which bears the glittering magic brand name “European”. If it is “European” it can do no wrong and the peasants must not be allowed to vote on it, in case we reject the glorious European Promised Land which has become the fanatical religion of parliament. Let us, then, look at the Europe into which our politicians are frogmarching the entire population of our once-independent country, in blinkered oblivion to all the horrific warning signs flashing red before us with the message legend places over the doors of Hell – “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here!”
In case you may accuse me of exaggerating, here are the specific figures which can be verified by looking at the “international debt clock” which can be found here, where one may alarmingly see the figure increasing in real time.
The debts of Greece amount to around £297 BILLION. With a population (as at 2008) of 11,262,000, this means that in order for the Greek economy merely to reach a zero balance, every taxpayer in the country must pay about £27,000 – and this only applies providing the debt figure does not increase. In Italy, the national debt figure needing to be repaid is actually more, £27,262 per person. In Spain the debt per citizen is £11,924. In France the figure per person is £22,509. In Germany it is £20,168. In the Netherlands it is£19,105. In Ireland it is£20,905. In Portugal it is £12,075.
In Britain, our national debt per person is already £17,378. Instead of leading us into the Promised Land, our European-loving politicians are leading us ever further into the Great European Swamp. If you remember Jack Lemmon as “Professor Fate” in the 1965 comedy film “The Great Race”, when the main cast are marooned on an iceberg, you may recall him being told by Tony Curtis not to worry the others by telling them the iceberg is melting. Perhaps, as we sink ever further into the Great European Bog, our politicians will give us the same answer that Professor Fate gave; “When the water reaches my bottom lip, I’m going to tell somebody!”
If the European Union were a horse, it would be shot! If the people of Britain had any sense at all, at the next general election they would vote for a party that will take us OUT of Europe, turn the economy around by ceasing all foreign aid, stopping waste on useless government spending (£12.7 billion wasted on the NHS computer system which is being scrapped – as the Daily Mail says, enough money to pay over 60,000 new nurses for 10 years!), by stopping paying Muslim fathers benefits for multiple wives and multiple offspring, by halting unrestricted immigration…
In short, the most truthful ever political slogan is: “Vote Nationalist to Save Britain!” This is the life-giving message we must hammer home to the British people in time for the next general election.
