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| Let's see how the Brits like being colonised… |
Daniel Hannan is a writer and journalist, and has been Conservative MEP for South East England since 1999. He speaks French and Spanish and loves Europe, but believes that the European Union is making its constituent nations poorer, less democratic and less free.
How Europe's crisis resolves itself as yet remains unknown. |
European Council President Herman Van Rompuy at an EU summit |
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| The Gipper never called her a European. |
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| Prime Minister David Cameron |
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| Douglas Carswell MP |
By Patrick J. Buchanan
The financial news of the week again is about the eurozone and we are seeing lots of entities come up with lots of possible solutions about how to solve the eurozone problem. They all of course rest on what to do about Greece. The problem is, they are coming from the wrong angle. From STRATFOR’s point of view, Greece does not have a particularly bright future as a state before the eurozone crisis is taken into account. |
| An EU calendar distributed to over three million pupils omitted major Christian holidays, including Christmas and Easter (CNS photo) |
As I have observed on various occasions, the roots of the West’s Christian culture remain deep; it was that culture which gave life and space to religious freedom and continues to nourish the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion … Today these basic human rights are again under threat from attitudes and ideologies which would impede free religious expression. Consequently, the challenge to defend and promote the right to freedom of religion and freedom of worship must be taken up once more in our days.
You might think this to be one of the ‘Euromyths’ – right up there with straight bananas, the re-classification of the carrot as a fruit and the EU-wide harmonisation of condom size.
These daily planners, of which three million have produced (courtesy of the taxpayer), include the holidays of Jews, Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus, but there is not one mention of Christian holidays."A true friend is someone who shares your worries and your joy.”That’s nice.
Under Britain’s just-ousted Labour government, the country joined an EU scheme to allow the government to gather data on citizens who voice or share “radical” political opinions. The move has prompted warnings from a civil liberties watchdog.
The NGO Statewatch said Monday that European governments are planning to force all of the continent’s telephone carriers, mobile network operators and Internet service providers to store details of their customers’ web use, e-mails and phone calls for up to 2 years.
Under the EU’s “data compilation instrument,” activists labeled by the government as “extreme right/left, Islamist, nationalist or anti-globalisation” may be put under surveillance, with the information gathered being made available to police and security forces in member states.
Statewatch warned that the scheme could be applied not only to those associated with terrorism but also to anyone with legitimate political differences with the state.
Confidential documents obtained by Statewatch reveal that the data-gathering originally intended to target “radicalisation and recruitment” in Islamic terrorist groups has been expanded to incorporate other, largely undefined, groups. Europol, an EU law enforcement agency, has already been asked to produce a list of people involved in promoting or recruiting in such groups.
Statewatch said, “The ‘instrument’ is not primarily about people or groups intending to commit terrorist acts. But rather directed at people and groups who hold radical views described as those propagating ‘RM’ (radical messages)."
“Who is going to be using this ‘instrument’ placing a very wide spectrum of people and groups under surveillance? EU police forces, security and intelligence agencies plus ‘EU institutions and agencies.’”
The European Parliament is currently debating changes to the 1997 EU Directive on privacy in telecommunications that states data can only be retained for billing purposes and must then be deleted. Proposed changes to the directive would allow individual countries to bring in laws forcing communications companies to retain data.
Statewatch, however, said their group has seen an EU “framework decision,” which would force all governments to pass laws that would compel communications companies to retain all traffic data for 12 to 24 months. This framework decision could be voted on as early as next month.
“EU governments claimed that changes to the 1997 EC Directive on privacy in telecommunications to allow for data retention and access by the law enforcement agencies would not be binding on member states - each national parliament would have to decide."
“Now we know that all along they were intending to make it binding, compulsory across Europe,” Tony Bunyan, editor of Statewatch, said in a statement.
The left-leaning Guardian newspaper suggests that the documents’ undefined term “domestic extremists,” could be used to target “law-abiding environmental protesters, anti-war activists, and anti-racist campaigners.”
The documents specify “environmental extremists,” along with far-right activists, dissident Irish republicans, loyalist paramilitaries, and al-Qaida inspired extremists, as being among groups “currently categorised as extremist [that] may include those who have committed serious crime in pursuit of an ideology or cause.”
But the documents include a note that individual states are expected to amend and tailor the scheme to local “needs.” In Britain’s current political climate, Christian and politically or socially conservative groups have already been heavily targeted for state interference.
Read Statewatch analysis here.
Pielgrzymi, Jasna Góra, Częstochowa, Polska 2008From the Guardian.
Germany is planning to stop what it sees as a British campaign to dominate European foreign policy-making under Lady Catherine Ashton, the Guardian can disclose.
Amid growing criticism across the EU of the performance of Baroness Ashton of Upholland, the EU's new high representative for foreign and security policy, Berlin and Paris are alarmed at the prominence of British officials in the new EU diplomatic service being formed under Ashton.
A confidential German foreign ministry document analysing the creation of the EU's new diplomatic service, seen by the Guardian, has concluded that Britain has grabbed an "excessive" and "over-proportionate" role.
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British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has pledged to attempt to force Eastern European countries to accept as legally valid homosexual civil partnerships contracted in Britain. Brown told Attitude, one of the UK's leading homosexualist magazines, "I'm fighting to get all the countries in Europe to recognise civil partnerships carried out in Britain." "We want countries where that hasn't been the case - especially in Eastern Europe - to recognise them. We're negotiating agreements with France and then with Spain."
"If we could show eastern Europe as well as western Europe, that this respect for gay people is due, that would be really important," said Brown. "Of course it will be tough, and will take many years, but that has never ever been a good reason not to fight."
He lauded civil partnership laws as a key achievement of the Labour party, saying it "showed our country is far more tolerant than people thought."
The Labour government's commitment to the homosexualist political agenda has been especially successful in schools where "sex education" has been made mandatory throughout all grades and opposition to homosexuality has been suppressed under the guise of combating "homophobic bullying."
Most recently, guidance issued by the Department of Education will see children as young as five taught in schools about "transsexual rights." Schools are recommended to use material produced by the government-funded homosexualist lobby group Stonewall to develop curriculum.
Homosexualist activists have made no secret of their intention to use various European Union bodies to force countries like Lithuania and Poland to accept homosexuality as a valid "sexual alternative." The proposal to force dissenting EU states to conform is a key project of the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA-Europe). ILGA told the European Parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs on Fundamental Rights that recognition of civil same-sex partnerings is one of the issues of "freedom of movement and mutual recognition of LGBT families relationships in the EU."
Some are calling for resistance to Brown's plan, saying it will threaten laws protecting the family across the EU. John Smeaton, the director of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children pointed to various developments that threaten the family in Europe. In January, Spain's Supreme Court ruled that parents do not have the right to opt out of the government's pro-homosexual and anti-family schools program. In September, the European Parliament passed a resolution against a new Lithuanian law seeking to protect minors from sexualization by society, and last week, eight fathers were jailed in Germany after refusing to send their children to sex education classes.
Smeaton wrote, "It is an illusion to think that we can build a true culture of human life if we do not offer adolescents and young adults an authentic education in sexuality, and in love, and the whole of life according to their true meaning and in their close interconnection."
Herman Van Rompuy. Get used to the name. He is the first President of the European Union, which with the ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon by all the 27 EU member states in early November was transformed into a genuine United States of Europe.In 1957, Belgian politicians stood at the cradle of the European Union. Their aim was to turn the whole of Europe into a Greater Belgium, so that wars between the nations of Europe would no longer be possible as there would no longer be nations, the latter all having been incorporated into an artificial superstate.
A closer look at Belgium, the laboratory of Europe, shows, however, that the country lacks more than patriotism. It also lacks democracy, respect for the rule of law, and political morality. In 1985, in his book De Afwezige Meerderheid (The Absent Majority) the late Flemish philosopher Lode Claes (1913-1997) argued that without identity and a sense of genuine nationhood, there can also be no democracy and no morality.
One of the people who were deeply influenced by Dr. Claes’s thesis was a young politician named Herman Van Rompuy. In the mid-1980s, Van Rompuy, a conservative Catholic, born in 1947, was active in the youth section of the Flemish Christian-Democrat Party. He wrote books and articles about the importance of traditional values, the role of religion, the protection of the unborn life, the Christian roots of Europe and the need to preserve them. The undemocratic and immoral nature of Belgian politics repulsed him and led to a sort of crisis of conscience. Lode Claes, who was near to retiring, offered Herman the opportunity of succeeding him as the director of Trends, a Belgian financial-economic weekly magazine. It is in this context that I made Herman’s acquaintance. He invited me for lunch one day to ask whether, if he accepted the offer to enter journalism, I would be willing to join him. It was then that he told me that he was considering leaving politics and was weighing the options for the professional life he would pursue.
I am not sure what happened next, however. Maybe word had reached the leadership of the Christian Democrat Party that Herman, a brilliant economist and intellectual, was considering leaving politics; perhaps they made him an offer he could not refuse. Herman remained in politics. He was made a Senator and entered government as a junior minister. In 1988, he became the party leader of the governing Christian-Democrats.
Our paths crossed at intervals until 1990, when the Belgian Parliament voted a very liberal abortion bill. The Belgian King Baudouin (1930-1993), a devout Catholic who suffered from the fact that he and his wife could not have any children, had told friends that he would “rather abdicate than sign the bill.” The Belgian politicians, convinced that the King was bluffing, did not want the Belgian people to know about the King’s objections to the bill. I wrote about this on the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal and was subsequently reprimanded by the Belgian newspaper I worked for, following an angry telephone call from the then Belgian Prime Minister, a Christian-Democrat, to my editor, who was this Prime Minister’s former spokesman. I was no longer allowed to write about Belgian affairs for foreign newspapers.
In April 1990, the King did in fact abdicate over the abortion issue, and the Christian-Democrat Party, led by Herman Van Rompuy, who had always prided himself on being a good Catholic, had one of Europe’s most liberal abortion bills signed by the college of ministers, a procedure provided by the Belgian Constitution for situations when there is no King. Then they had the King voted back on the throne the following day. I wrote about the whole affair in a critical follow-up article for The Wall Street Journal and was subsequently fired by my newspaper “for grievous misconduct”. A few weeks later, I met Herman at the wedding of a mutual friend. I approached him for a chat. I could see he felt very uncomfortable. He avoided eye contact and broke off the conversation as soon as he could. We have not spoken since.
Herman’s political career continued. He became Belgium’s Budget Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, Speaker of the Chamber of Representatives and finally Prime Minister. He kept publishing intellectual and intelligent books, but instead of defending the concept of the good, he now defended the concept of “the lesser evil.” And he began to write haiku.
Two years ago, Belgium faced its deepest political crisis ever. The country was on the verge of collapse following a 2003 ruling by its Supreme Court that the existing electoral district of Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde (BHV), encompassing both the bilingual capital Brussels and the surrounding Dutch-speaking countryside of Halle-Vilvoorde, was unconstitutional and that Parliament should remedy the situation. The ruling came in response to a complaint that the BHV district was unconstitutional and should be divided into a bilingual electoral district Brussels and a Dutch-language electoral district Halle-Vilvoorde. This complaint had been lodged by… Herman Van Rompuy, a Flemish inhabitant of the Halle-Vilvoorde district.
In 2003, however, the Christian-Democrats were not in government and Herman was a leader of the opposition. His complaint was intended to cause political problems for Belgium’s Liberal government, which refused to divide the BHV district because the French-speaking parties in the government refused to accept the verdict of the Supreme Court. The Flemish Christian-Democrats went to the June 2007 general elections with as their major theme the promise that, once in government, they would split BHV. Herman campaigned on the issue, his party won the elections and became Flanders’ largest party.
Belgium’s political crisis dragged on from June until December 2007 because it proved impossible to put together a government consisting of sufficient Dutch-speaking (Flemish) and French-speaking (Walloon) politicians. The Flemings demanded that BHV be split, as instructed by the Supreme Court; the Walloons refused to do so. Ultimately, the Flemish Christian-Democrats gave in, reneged on their promise to their voters, and agreed to join a government without BHV being split. Worse still, the new government has more French-speaking than Dutch-speaking ministers, and does not have the support of the majority of the Flemings in Parliament, although the Flemings make up a 60% majority of the Belgian population. Herman became the Speaker of the Parliament. In this position he had to prevent Parliament, and the Flemish representatives there, from voting a bill to split BHV. He succeeded in this, by using all kinds of tricks. One day he even had the locks of the plenary meeting room changed so that Parliament could not convene to vote on the issue. On another occasion, he did not show up in his office for a whole week to avoid opening a letter demanding him to table the matter. His tactics worked. In December 2008, when the Belgian Prime Minister had to resign in the wake of a financial scandal, Herman became the new leader of the predominantly French-speaking government which does not represent the majority of Belgium’s ethnic majority group. During the past 11 months, he has skillfully managed to postpone any parliamentary vote on the BHV matter, thereby prolonging a situation which the Supreme Court, responding to Herman's own complaint in 2003, has ruled to be unconstitutional.
Now, Herman has moved on to lead Europe. Like Belgium, the European Union is an undemocratic institution, which needs shrewd leaders who are capable of renouncing everything they once believed in and who know how to impose decisions on the people against the will of the people. Never mind democracy, morality or the rule of law, our betters know what is good for us more than we do. And Herman is now one of our betters. He has come a long way since the days when he was disgusted with Belgian-style politics.
Herman is like Saruman, the wise wizard in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, who went over to the other side. He used to care about the things we cared about. But no longer. He has built himself a high tower from where he rules over all of us.
Paul Belien is the author of A Throne in Brussels – Britain, the Saxe-Coburgs and the Belgianisation of Europe, Imprint Academic, Exeter (UK), Charlottesville, VA (US).
