The EU is a flimsy structure built on a foundation of lies. These are indeed fundamental, not a misquoted number here or there. Listing all the lies would be tedious, but it’s worth mentioning some salient ones, those bandied about widely.
One is that the EU is primarily a trading bloc, pursuing not so much political ends as the economic good of its members. In fact, the reverse is true – and has been from the very beginning. Witness these two quotations from Jean Monnet, the first one from 1943:
“There will be no peace in Europe, if the states are reconstituted on the basis of national sovereignty… The European states must constitute themselves into a federation.”
That’s the strategy. Here are the tactics:
“Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose but which will irreversibly lead to federation.”
Cynical? Devious? Evil? All those things, to be sure. But above all those clear statements are to the point: any claim that the EU is mainly about economics is a lie.
Nor does Germany, the EU’s ringleader, care about the wellbeing of other members – that’s another lie. Time and again the economic interests of every member nation except Germany have been wantonly sacrificed for political ends.
After all, no one could have been so stupid as to believe that fusing 28 nations, each with its own history and culture, into a single economic and political entity could possibly work. And as to the lunatic idea of imposing a single currency on 19 nations varying from Germany and Holland to Greece and Portugal, the results are there for all to see.
National economies were sacrificed at the altar of wicked politics, which is why the per capita GDP of every eurozone country (save Germany, of course) has declined since Maastricht.
However, of all the flagrant lies spouted by Eurogues, none incenses me more than the claim often heard in southern Europe, that the EU is a product of Catholic universalism, the modern answer to the Holy Roman Empire.
At play here is another example of what I call the larcenous shift of modernity, wherein Christendom’s social and moral property was broken off its religious underpinnings, dragged into the house of the new owner and adapted to his nefarious purposes.
Thus Christian expansiveness was transformed into modern expansionism. Christian introspection became modern obsession with psychology, understood in a materialistic way. And Christian nurturing of reason as a cognitive tool, one of many, re-appeared as modern belief in reason as a be-all and end-all.
Another term I favour is ‘rule by simulacrum’: people are fed sounds to which their ears have been attuned for centuries, except that those sounds now mean something different. Thus nebulous, secular human rights are a simulacrum of the Christian belief in the self-significance of every person created in the image of God; destructive modern egalitarianism is a simulacrum of the Christian belief in equality of all before God – and so forth.
By the same token, the founders of the EU, many of them Catholics (Monnet, Schuman, Gasperi, Adenauer, Spinelli), created a secular simulacrum of Catholic universalism. Hence their liberal use of words like ‘solidarity’ and ‘subsidiarity’, which came from the lexicon of Catholic social teaching.
That those men were raised as Catholics had as little significance as the Catholic background of Hitler or the Orthodox one of Stalin. Whatever they were in their private lives, in their pan-European politics they pursued strictly non-Christian, not to say anti-Christian, aims.
In this they followed a path well-trodden by all heresies throughout history. Heretics readily accept most of doctrine – except one detail. That one fragment is then broken off the whole and peddled as the most important thing. The ostensible aim is purification and simplification. The real aim is perversion and destruction.
Thus Arianism, a heresy that began, and almost made sure Christianity would end, in the third century, accepted practically the whole doctrine: a single, loving, omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent God, Jesus Christ as the Son of God endowed with divine nature. One minor thing they didn’t accept was Christ being consubstantial and coeternal with the Father, part of the same triune Godhead.
That minor detail eliminated at a stroke the Holy Trinity, the cornerstone of Christianity, reducing Christ to the same role he’d later play in Islam, that of merely an important, divinely inspired prophet. Had Arius not been defeated at the 325 Council of Nicaea, Christianity would have been reduced to an obscure cult.
By the same token, those Catholics who conceived an EU, took such Catholic concepts as universalism and solidarity coupled with subsidiarity and shifted them into the secular realm of wicked politics. Alas, one minor detail, God, got lost along the way.
The genesis of the EU owes more (though not everything, I hasten to add) to the Third Reich than to the Holy Roman Empire. However, one has to admire the sheer effrontery of those who insist on its Catholic roots. Lesser men would be too embarrassed to pull such a fraudulent trick.