Why defeat an evil empire – and then embrace a stupid one ?

Peter Hitchens

The European Union is like a hospital where all the doctors are mad. It doesn’t matter what is wrong, the treatment is always the same – more integration – and it is always wrong. The best thing to do is never to enter it.

Once you are in, the best thing to do is to leave. If you can’t get out, you will probably die.

Those of us who pay attention to history, politics and truth have known this for many years.

But as the EU’s ‘experts’ and ‘technocrats’ insanely destroy the economies of Greece, Spain and Italy, it must now surely be obvious to everyone.

The EU, far from being a bright future, offers nothing but bankruptcy and decline.
If the old USSR was an Evil Empire – and it was – the EU is the Stupid Empire.

Obsessed with the idea that the nation state is obsolete, the EU has sought to bind its colonies tightly, while pretending they are still independent.

This is why what is essentially a modern German empire is not held together by armies, but by a sticky web of regulations and a currency that destroys prosperity wherever it is introduced (with one important exception, Germany itself, for whom the euro means cheap exports to Asia).

It is also why it has been built backwards, starting with the roof and ending with the foundations. Old-fashioned empires were at least honest.

They marched in, plundered everything they could cart away, killed or imprisoned resisters, suborned collaborators, and imposed their language on the conquered.

Other humiliating measures followed – forcing the newly-subject people to live according to the invader’s time, to pay special taxes to their new masters, to surrender control of their borders, to use the invader’s weights and measures, salute the invader’s flag and obey the invader’s laws.

Eventually, after a few years of imposed occupation money, set at a viciously rigged exchange rate, the subjugated nation’s economy would have been reduced to such a devastated and dependent state that it could be forced to accept the imperial currency.

The EU, which cannot admit to being what it really is, has to achieve the same means sideways or backwards. The colonial laws are disguised as local Acts of Parliament. The flag is slowly introduced, the borders stealthily erased, the weights and measures and the clocks gradually brought into conformity.

Resources (such as Britain’s fisheries) are bureaucratically plundered, giant taxes are  quietly levied, but collected by our own Revenue & Customs as our ‘contribution’, our banking industry is menaced.

Opponents are politically marginalised, collaborators discreetly rewarded, armed forces quietly dismantled or placed under supranational command. It is happening before our eyes and yet, while the exit is still just open, we make no move to depart.

Our grandchildren will wonder, bitterly, why we were so feeble.