The British embraced socialism after World War II, and year after year, election after election, they moved further towards the cesspit of totalitarianism. They nationalized their industries, indentured their doctors, persecuted business, and taxed and spent until their economy and society collapsed in the 1978 Winter of Discontent. Having thoroughly exhausted the alternative, the British people finally voted for independence, freedom, and self-reliance under Margaret Thatcher. They exercised their sovereign power to change their country’s direction by a simple majority vote.
Today, however, there is no sovereignty left in Britain. If 99 percent of the British people wish to change a European Union directive, they cannot. They are no longer in control of the laws under which they live. It is this that makes the European Union a tyranny.
Democracies with the smallest populations have the most political liberty, while those with the largest have the least. Thus, an island democracy with ten citizens would enjoy the most liberty, as each citizen would control, by his vote, one-tenth of all political power. By contrast, an individual living in the EU, with its 500 million inhabitants, is, in practice, powerless to influence the laws that govern him.
Some delude themselves into thinking that the European Union is simply a United States of Europe. However, nothing could be further from the truth. From the beginning, the emphasis in Europe has been on ‘harmonizing’ every tiny aspect of domestic governance—whereas in the United States, from the very beginning the emphasis was on the states retaining the power to pass their own unique laws. Nor can the European Union be reformed; its philosophy is rotten to the core. It could no more be reformed than its ideological predecessor, the Soviet Union.
The bureaucrats are in control
The history of each learned society, or society for other purpose, shows how the staff, permanent or partially permanent, sways the proceedings and determines the actions of the society with but little resistance, even when most members of the society disapprove … . If, then, this supremacy of the regulators is seen … what will the supremacy of the regulators become … in bodies which have become vast and highly organized, and in bodies which, instead of controlling only a small part of the unit’s life, control the whole of his life?
—Herbert Spencer. From Freedom to Bondage, 1891.
In every organizational structure, the permanent staff are always able to manipulate affairs, despite the disapproval of its members. Thus, rank and file union members lose control to their officials, and the owners of public companies are helpless against the board of directors. The larger and more complex the organization, the more pronounced the effect. It is most pronounced in government, worst in national governments, and worst of all in pan-national governments. Previously the most bureaucratically controlled structure on earth, whose members had the least control of its actions, was the Soviet Union. That distinction now belongs to the European Union.
What the European Treaties mean
In 1766 the British Parliament passed the Declaratory Act, which sought to strip the thirteen American colonies of their freedom using the following wording:
The colonies and plantations in America have been, are, and of right ought to be, subordinate unto, and dependent upon the imperial crown and Parliament of Great Britain; and that the King’s Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, of Great Britain, in Parliament assembled, had, hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America, subjects of the crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever.
And be it further declared and enacted that all resolutions, votes, orders, and proceedings, in any of the said colonies or plantations, whereby the power and authority of the Parliament of Great Britain to make laws and statutes as aforesaid is denied, or drawn into question, are, and are hereby declared to be, utterly null and void to all intents and purposes whatsoever.
This was a breach of the natural law, and the Americans quite understandably went to war to dispute the claim. The purveyors of legalized tyranny learned their lesson and have since become more subtle. Accordingly the treaties which underlie the European Union are so verbose, and so unfathomably drafted, that not one in ten million of those whose liberties are nullified have read and understood them. Nevertheless, they may be fairly summarized as follows:
The member nations have been, are, and of right ought to be, subordinate unto, and dependent upon, the Parliament of the European Union; and that, by and with the advice and consent of the bureaucrats of the European commission, hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the member nations and people of every member nation, in all cases whatsoever.
And be it further declared and enacted by the authority aforesaid, that all resolutions, votes, orders, and proceedings, in any of the said nations or countries, whereby the power and authority of the Parliament of the European Union to make laws and statutes as aforesaid is denied, or drawn into question, or are inconsistent with the same, are hereby declared to be utterly null and void to all intents and purposes whatsoever.
A European Parliament will never work
To have a genuine European democracy you would … be in the same position as the unwieldy Habsburg Empire’s Parliament. That Parliament was a notorious failure. There were dozens of political parties, and nearly a dozen peoples were represented—Germans, Italians, Czechs, Poles and so on. For the Government to get anything through … took ages, as all the various interests had to be propitiated. When one or other was not satisfied, its spokesmen resorted to obstruction—lengthy speeches in Russian, banging of desk-lids, throwing of inkwells, and on one occasion the blowing of a cavalry trumpet by the Professor of Jurisprudence at the German University of Prague. Measures could not be passed, and budgets could only be produced by decree.
—Margaret Thatcher. Speech at The Hague, May 15, 1992.
Europe is not the United States of America. The United States was formed when the English people suffered a schism. The resulting new nation was a single people, with a single language, a single legal tradition, a single culture, and a single history. Although immigrants have since come to America from all over the world, they have not balkanized it. For the most part, regardless of their race, by the third generation have become as American as apple pie.
By contrast the European Union is, and will always be, balkanized. This is because the people of Europe—like the people of the United States—are rightly patriotic. Patriotism is the love of those who speak and think like you, it derives from the same instinct as love for the family, and it is part of human nature. They will never identify with each other the way the people of the United States do, because they are not a single people with a single language, a single legal tradition, a single culture, and a single history.
Socialist fantasies can never indoctrinate human nature out of existence. That is why generations of children in the Soviet Union rejected the communist insistence that they were ‘Soviets,’ and instead believed what their parents told them—they were Russians, Latvians, Ukrainians, Georgians, etc. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the countries that were erased from the map seventy years before sprung back into existence.
Patriotism is good—socialism is evil
Patriotism, or love of country, is a noble passion, and illustrates the character of every people who enjoy any just portion of liberty under civil institutions. It is indispensably necessary to any good degree of security, or prosperity, in a nation.
—Nathaniel Chipman. Principles of Government: A Treatise on Free Institutions, 1833.
Karl Marx claimed there was a great international brotherhood, but like the rest of his theory, this had no basis in reality. It was a mere invention of his warped mind. The only people who are brothers are those born of the same parents. Thereafter, there are:
- Grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles; then
- Second cousins, great aunts and great uncles; then
- Family friends and church groups; then
- People who come from the same town as you; then
- Your country; then
- Other nations which speak the same tongue and are in the same neighborhood as yours, for example, as between United States and Canada; then
- Other nations that speak your tongue but are in a different neighborhood, for example, as between United States and Australia; then
- Other liberal democracies in your neighborhood, for example, as between France and Britain; then
- Other liberal democracies, for example, as between Germany and Japan; finally
- There is the kinship with the rest of humanity.
No good people wish any other people ill. Good people just want to live their own lives, in their own way—rather than having someone else’s decisions or values forced upon them. This desire for self-determination is the strongest guarantor of world peace and international harmony. Once the culture of a people evolves to the point where they no longer want to oppress other peoples—and instead wish them prosperity and independence—the threat of conflict vanishes. It follows that the desire of people to live with their own kind is not an evil; rather the opposite is true. The socialists are wrong to suggest ‘patriotism’ is a dirty word; it is in fact a profound good—like the word ‘family.’ It is in perfect harmony with respect for the rights of others and therefore with the dignity of all.
Political liberty is being surrendered—and with it, civil liberty
Sometimes people who do not normally vote get so outraged at some government policy that they finally throw off their ambivalence and march to the polling booth and contribute to the removal of the incumbent. This is how democracy works and how political liberty safeguards civil liberty. Yet with each successive European Union treaty, and with each successive European Union directive, the people of Europe surrender more of their political liberty to unaccountable bureaucrats. Although the loss of political liberty may seem unimportant at the time, the loss of civil liberty which follows will be of vital importance.
No one should forget what befell the Ukraine in the early twentieth century. Between 1917 and 1920, Ukrainians dithered away their independence, allowing the Soviet Union to take away their political power. “How bad could it be?” the average Ukrainian seemed to think. They soon found out. During Stalin’s collectivization campaign, everything the Ukrainian peasants owned was confiscated. This provoked a famine that claimed more than ten million Ukrainian lives. That was not enough for Stalin; he then ordered the execution of the wealthier farmers, along with the Ukraine’s artists, writers and intellectuals. The wretched Ukrainians, unlike the Finns, lacked political or military power to fight back. Their earlier folly meant they did not even have the dignity of going down fighting in a glorious last stand (Although the German invasion in 1941 at least restored this dignity through the efforts of the brave soldiers of the UPA.). The lesson to be learned is that once people surrender their sovereignty, they can be led like lambs to the slaughter. Europeans are making the same mistake right now.
