June 24, 2007
IN THE ABSENCE OF FAITH THEY'RE DOWN TO TRANSNATIONALISM VS. NATIONALISM:
Constituting EU (David Warren, 6/24/07, Real Clear Politics)
The new draft treaty, like the old, would include longer terms for president and members of the EU Council, and lay the foundations for a centralized European foreign office. It would assign new voting weights in legislative elections, and alter other voting formulae to enhance the power of France and Germany, and extend the EU's ability to interfere in the smaller states' domestic and judicial arrangements. The most frightening proposal is the one least appreciated: to create a European "charter of fundamental rights" that will accomplish the precise opposite of what it claims. It will swing the iron claw of "progressive thought" through the soft flesh of human variety, enterprise, and freedom, on an unprecedented scale.It is time people realized that "human rights codes" are a weapon employed by the state to suppress disapproved behaviour by the individual. They cannot be wielded by the individual against the state, as independent civil and criminal courts could be. They are star chambers used, and designed to be used, to mount show trials, in which persons who fail to snap to attention when commissar issues the latest political corrections may be publicly demonized. By removing all of their victims' established legal protections -- presumption of innocence, the right to know one's accuser, to be tried by a jury of one's peers, et cetera -- they put a jackboot directly in the teeth of the tradition of human liberty descending from Magna Charta. The tribunals are created, always, by bureaucratic fiat.
Democracy is not quite dead in Europe, but getting that way. The cumbersome, incompetent, ridiculously corrupt, incredibly arrogant, and unelected Euro-bureaucracy is already in a position to dictate trans-European policies that by-pass all national legislatures. There is nothing to stop, or even slow, the metastasis of micro-managing regulations that interfere with the daily lives and customs of half-a-billion souls.
There actually is one force that can -- and likely will -- stop it: nationalism. But that'll just move Europe from the frying pan to the Reichstag fire. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 24, 2007 9:04 AM
"they put a jackboot directly in the teeth of the tradition of human liberty descending from Magna Charta."
But ziss ist not England, but Fraance and Germany and, err, the Economic Union.
Posted by: Genecis at June 24, 2007 9:55 AM" 'the black heart of Europe' -- i.e. the European Union bureaucracy, that has tied the continent together in a great stagnant mass, and presides over its accelerating slide into the trash heap of history."
* Sounds like the U.N.
"It has tremendous power, and no responsibilities: the prerogative of the harlot on a scale that is impossible for the citizen to imagine."
**Sounds like the U. S. "Main Stream Media."
"the two things you never mention in the company of European politicians: the War, and Europe's Christian heritage. Neither ever happened in the official view of the "new Europe," and mentioning them is in the poorest possible taste."
***Sounds like they can't make up their mind who won: Germany or the Soviet Union.
Kind of creepy, particularly if one has ever listened to that fat TV preacher who always says the EU is the anti-Christ.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5193092.stm
"Pastor" John Hagee teaches that the EU is some fulfillment of things in Secred Scripture about "kings of the North" (or maybe that's Russia) who are going to attack Israel in the replay of Armageddon.
Posted by: Lou Gots at June 24, 2007 5:18 PM