Tune in man … tune in … and drop out …
Branko Malić
21st Century Wire
One of my perennial dilemmas – right there with a question on whether the circle can be squared – is the following one:
Are eurocrats a band of intelligent, but devious, power mongers or are they just plain stupid?
The joint policy document issued by French and German Foreign Ministers, named “A strong Europe in a world of uncertainties”, did a Wittgenstein job on this question proving it meaningless. Namely, there’s a clear answer outside of the phony dilemma:
Those freaks are substance abusing …
The only remaining question is: are they pill popping, acid licking or mushroom chewing.
Whatever it is, I would sure like to get my hands on it.
Namely, the document in question, leaked to a Polish broadcaster TVP Info, was meant to provide the members of Visegrad Group in particular and, presumably, European national leaders in general with a blueprint for retaining confidence of the European nation’s plebs in EU supranational institutions, in the wake of looming Brexit.
Well, call me old-fashioned but I always kinda thought that deviousness is necessarily accompanied by intelligence. Even cursory reading of this document shook my life-long belief. Closer reading shattered it completely. With only one caveat we’ll address in the end.
The policy in question, at the outset, informs the vassals who’s the boss in this partnership of equals:
“Our two countries (i.e. France & Germany) share a common destiny and a common set of values that provide the foundation for an ever closer union between our peoples. We will therefore move further towards political union in Europe and invite the other Europeans to join us in this endeavour.”
Well, they could have said that exactly 102 years ago today, when it mattered, and when another incompetent crazy, Gavrilo Prinzip, pulled the trigger and scored surprisingly competent hit which ignited the First World War, but I guess both then UK Government and Grand Orient de France would have vehemently objected. Now, this affirmation of solidarity between two nations comprising European axis in a push to revoke national sovereignty can only be observed as a demonic irony reserved for those moments preceding historical catastrophes.
Be that as it may, the gist of the proposals outlined on 9 pages of this document is that they are completely counter propositional to their declarative purpose.
Regaining the trust of Europeans in EU Behemoth is to be accomplished by introducing “more Europe” which is a slogan that translates as “more EU bureaucracy”.
There are three areas of society targeted for “radical change” which will make Europeans forfeit their ethnic and other differences and whistle Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, and authors correctly detect them as crucial. Those are security, immigration and monetary union. But what they mean to do with them, purportedly intending to regain confidence of citizens, is beyond belief. Let’s start with security:
European Security Compact
So people want to leave the EU and the first thing you do to persuade them to stay is create an army to “counter internal and external threats”. The purpose of ESC, as the authors of the document state, is:
“Providing security for Europe as well as contributing to peace and stability globally is at the heart of European project.”
Not the people to make you take their word for it, they remind the plebs on their recent accomplishments such as:
“European engagement in the Minsk process has helped to contain a military confrontation in eastern Ukraine that could have easily spiraled out of control. (…) In Libya, we support the emerging government of national accord endeavouring to address the risks posed by state fragility and instability in the Southern Mediterranean.”
Not to mention, of course, that those conflicts were indirectly (Ukraine) or directly (Libya) incited by EU policy, in the second instance by one of the two self proclaimed leaders: the France, but why bother with the details.
So, in the face of growing popular distrust about the EU project, which can be summed up as a feeling that the damn thing is trumping the individual sovereignty, the solution is … to militarize it:
“The EU should be able to plan and conduct civil and military operations more effectively, with the support of a permanent civil-military chain of command. The EU should be able to rely on employable high-readiness forces and provide common financing for its operations. Within the framework of the EU, member states willing to establish permanent structured cooperation in the field of defence or to push ahead to launch operations should be able to do so in a flexible manner. If needed, EU member states should consider establishing standing maritime forces or acquiring EU-owned capabilities in other key areas.”
So you have a populous in angst about their sovereignty and you proceed to alleviate it by proposing to further strip them of it, because, with all due respect to pacifists, military capacity is one of few crucial indicators of political sovereignty.
Peoples of Europe increasingly observe EU as an imposed, authoritarian, technocratic command system and in order to prove them wrong eurocrats present them with an image of militarized, imposed, authoritarian, technocratic command system.
Who are internal and external enemies? The authors of the document don’t say it explicitly which makes the proposal even more ominous, but we can assume that they mean phantom threat of terrorism and instability inducing uncontrolled wave of immigrants.
The other factor is the subject of second proposal.
Common European asylum and migration policy
Immigration is often pointed out as the main impetus for Brexit, and it obviously served as a basis of smear tactics to denounce the ‘leave’ voters as xenophobes, racists, fear-mongers, etc. While it is often correctly pointed out that this is the problem far preceding the creation of EU, the immigration crisis, incited by Angela Merkel’s “invitation” from little less than a year ago, turned it into cause of anxiety for everyone, and not only UK citizens.
The (i)migrant crisis is historically unique event in the sense that it was an attempt of one geopolitical entity to flood itself with up to 20 million residents of other geopolitical entity without any regulation whatsoever. For anyone with modicum of brains – which apparently excludes a good chunk of left-leaning intelligentsia – this was, on the face of it, completely lunatic, and more importantly: a-historical, move. Namely, uncontrolled migrations are historically one of the top threats one geopolitical entity can issue to another as a mean of coercion. It is enough to recall how Moammar Gadafi blackmailed the EU with a threat of letting lose uncontrolled waves of immigrants, the blackmail that got him quite hefty sums until NATO, eurocrats, and France in particular, decided that it’s time to depose him and turn Lybia into black hole of chaos.
All of the sudden, just a year ago, they decided to take the diametrically opposed policy on immigration and invite the entire war torn Middle East into Western and North-Western Europe.
The uncontrolled immigration that supposedly coerced the Britons into Brexit was stopped by acts of sovereign states, like Hungary, and not by any act of EU. The whole range of emotionally ridden slogans was employed to present this as a simple matter of human rights and not as what it essentially was meant to be: turning of masses of people into weapon of coercion aimed at one’s own citizens.
Now, as eurocrats were forced to step back, due to enormous popular backlash, all of the sudden the main problem became how to curb the immigration – the standpoint best expressed by Georg Soros who in the span of some 6 months took a 180 degrees turn from advocating a minimum of million immigrants per year to accusing the designated bogeyman Vladimir Putin of attempting to disintegrate EU by inciting the immigration wave.
Well, now the leaders of EU are apparently adding additional 180 degrees and coming full circle as the common asylum policy they are advocating states that:
“There shall be no unilateral national answers to the migration challenge, which is a truly European challenge of the 21th century. Our citizens expect that we firmly regain control on our external borders while preserving our European values. We have to act jointly to live up to this expectation.”
Well, tough luck because European citizens expect precisely the opposite. It is glaringly obvious that immigration wave was curbed only by unilateral national answers as well as it is obvious that invitation to chaos – which this demographic shift if brought to it’s full potential essentially is – was an unilateral EU bureaucracy answer. Never mind it came from Merkel’s lips.
The proposal now is that the EU borders should be controlled by supranational FRONTEX forces which would, of course, be centrally ran because if anybody thinks that there’s such thing as a democratically run army, he is probably finalizing the divorce with his own reason.
Well, who cares, because:
“Solidarity remains a cornerstone of our European project. Citizens expect that the benefits and burdens of EU membership be evenly shared among member states. A situation in which the burden of migration is unevenly carried by a limited number of member states is unsustainable.”
On the contrary, citizens expect the burden of immigration to be allocated on somebody else’s shoulders if it cannot be removed all together. If eurocrats don’t get this, blossoming Far Right surely does. The building of common asylum system is precisely what Soros proposed in his pro-immigration phase and consequently caused public outcry throughout Europe.
Yet here we have it all back to square one: proposal to appease the citizens by providing them exactly with what they fear.
It’s putting down fire with a gasoline – a clear sign of what we, in the wake of this crisis, defined as chaos logic. Let’s keep this in mind, because we’ll return to it.
Fostering growth and completing the Economic and Monetary Union
And now, for the icing on the cake or, if you prefer, a missing capstone in the pyramid: a watertight monetary union. Here, predictably, we have a winner:
“Since economic policy-making in the EMU is increasingly a domain of shared decisions, citizens rightly expect to regain control via supranational institutions accountable to them.”
Indeed, blessed are the poor in spirit. Let’s quote some of this again, ‘cos it’s so good:
“citizens rightly expect to regain control via supranational institutions”
I sure hope that abused substance was not an acid, because the flashbacks could prove to be shattering for participants of this psychedelic party.
So, the peoples of, not only Europe, but whole Western world, are progressively waking to the fact that supranational institutions are there precisely to take any semblance of control from their hands, and authors of the document are alleviating their fears by declaring the need for founding more such structures.
“More Europe” means less freedom, political and otherwise. And it is expressed in frank, non-uncertain, terms to people eager to hear precisely the opposite.
“A fiscal capacity – a common feature of any successful monetary union around the globe – remains a missing keystone in the EMU architecture. In the long run it should provide macroeconomic stabilisation at the eurozone level while avoiding permanent unidirectional transfers.”
Read this: fiscal discipline imposed by central body, supposedly to be controlled by EU Parliament. This of course means less freedom of choice to member states when it comes to monetary policy and economy in general.
France and Germany are to provide leadership, i.e. to dominate others, in this matter.
Psychedelic or chaos logic?
On the face of it, this looks like a result of complete divorce from reality on behalf of EU leaders. If so, they are merely couple of acid/pills/mushroom freaks doing their thing to their own disadvantage, providing little old me with feeling of intellectual superiority for pointing all this out.
Yet, there’s one thing about feeling of superiority that life has taught me: 9 out of 10 times when you start to feel superior, get ready for hitting the rock bottom, ass first. The 1 out of 10 times is when you do it head first.
So, for the sake of argumentative, open ended, conclusion we’ll assume that there’s no stupidity here. Only two options are open, then:
One, that those people are stark raving mad, which disqualifies any rational objections, because madness is rationality pushed to a suicidal extreme – rationality above possible objections. And – two: that the whole thing is done intentionally to consciously incite chaos.
The first instance is psychedelic logic, when subject sees no problem in jumping through the window because he imagines having wings. The second instance is making everyone else jump through the window by inducing the controlled demolition of a building.
Every proposition of Franco-German EU leadership is a counterproposition in the sense that it will produce the effect counter to their open intentions. It will further strengthen the urge in European peoples to follow the example of Brexit, in all probability on the lines of Far Right, because more balanced voices are systematically stifled in media and parliaments; it will further increase fear of EU centralization, because, after all, this is what it openly proposes; finally it will increase resentment towards the European axis which apparently declares that reins of power are in it’s hands.
Whether this is induced by hallucinogenics or intention to create a creative chaos – or it is merely a reaction of complex system to reality it was not designed to cope with – the result will be the same:
Increased chaos and, consequently, compulsive need for order.
How long until it becomes the cry for any kind of order but this?
Far Right kind of order, perhaps, since no middle ground is allowed?
If this is the case, the joke is on me. Because managing the splintered, Far Right ran Europe, has proven to be a cake walk for Globalists some 70 odd years ago.
If not, the joke is still on me. Because rationality is powerless in the face of random acts of madness.
In the face of the system of madness it becomes sort of a joke itself.
***
Author Branko Malić is a Croatian author and owner of Kali Tribune, with the background in classical philosophy. He’s focused on philosophy, media, culture and deep politics analysis.
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