Timothy Birdnow

I once compared the E.U. to the monster created by Viktor Frankenstein. Frankenstein, you may remember, created his monster from the body parts of a host of dead people, and imbued it with a kind of shadowy life (really, a sort of walking dead) through the efficacy of modern technology. The true monster in the story was the good doctor himself, who subordinated all thoughts of morality or humanity to his absolute lust for scientific achievement. Frankenstein almost immediately abandoned his poor creature, which eventually destroyed him.

The E.U. was like that; an amalgamation of nations, many with little in common except their proximity, stitched awkwardly together to create an illusion of life. The E.U. was never a nation, but a type of empire, much like the unlamented Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Hapsburgs had been. Nobody save the nobility shed a single tear for the AH, and nobody will for the E.U. either, save the Eurolites who have reigned there.

These sorts of empires are nothing new. Consider the Soviet Union, which included countries that had nothing in common with the Great Russians but simply could not stop being dragged in by economic, political, and military forces beyond their control. Lithuania, for example, was an old enemy of the Russians but became a vassal under the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was an abject failure, economically, socially, spiritually. Every such empire winds up failing. Napoleon's short-lived creation bombed. Charlemagne's First Reich splintered. The Normans failed to retain control of both Britain and the French coast. I could go on and on with this.

Why did most African nations fail after the end of the Colonial period? Because they were the same sort of amalgamated empires as the E.U. is today. And we can go all the way back, look at the empires of the Mongols or Huns or even the Romans and see how such civilizations eventually flame out because there is not enough to hold them together. Force alone becomes, in the end, the key to their unity, and force is a poor motivator over the long term. There have to be more durable threads.

At the same time, the British Commonwealth has done spectacularly well, because it has no pretensions at maintaining anything but cultural and economic ties. There is no pretension to empire in the Commonwealth, and, say, Australia is happy to remain in the entente because it is beneficial. Oh, and they have common cultural ties through their positions as former British colonies.

Unity is not always good; there is such a thing as too much unity, which becomes stifling. The Jim Jones cult was a case in point; they were unified up to the consumption of cyanide-laced soft drinks. It was an unhealthy unity. On the other hand, anarchy is equally oppressive, with the city of Ferguson being illustrative of the oppression of anarchy. There must be a middle ground to any culture. Sadly, in the last two hundred years the tendency has been toward more unity, to bigger and bigger, to controls and regulations and compulsions. And far too many intellectuals and leaders think that more is indeed merrier.

Fay Voshell has an excellent article here today about the meaning of Brexit and the abominable nature of the E.U. I suggest everyone read it.

The E.U. was always a Godless enterprise designed to strip away the cultural and spiritual trappings of the People in favor of a soulless artifice, a Frankenstonian monstrosity composed of ill-fitting parts reanimated and repurposed. It has always been a soul-crushing enterprise. It was the fondest dream of the European socialists to create a borderless world where Man is fitted to his circumstances rather than his world giving him opportunities to mature and grow.

Fay makes the case:

"The fatal flaw of the European Union has been its leaders’ assumption that human beings and nations can be regulated and managed as easily and thoroughly as cabbages are grown, bought and sold.

Reductionism is always the Achilles heel of ideological zealots, who in the case of Brussels’ bureaucrats, are committed to a solely materialist view of humanity and nations. We have seen the "successes” of the materialist view of humanity and nations in the past, most notably in the form of communist ideology, which purportedly would end all class structures and therefore all wars, as class struggle due to economic inequality was the chief cause of violence. End the class system and establish equality, especially economic equality, and peace would ensue.

The ideology behind the EU is also materialist in nature, and therefore very similar to that of communist and socialist beliefs. "Equality” is the goal, with the accompanying postulation that the end of nation states is a realistic solution to the internecine wars that have afflicted Europe, especially the wars of the twentieth century. Nations are seen as the cause of violence, and as such inherently evil. End national identities as once classes were to be eliminated; and establish a super state which encourages uniformity of nations along with the obliteration of differences among humans, and peace will reign. Laws and regulations for the economic union would establish equality among humans, tribes and nations as surely as one can establish the proper length of bananas."

End excerpt.

I worked in the produce department at a grocery store for a number of years and can tell you how things work. Perfectly good food is frequently (not sometimes) thrown away because it is not to the consumer's liking in appearance. Take nectarines; when they are ripening their skins wrinkle and they look unappealing, but this is when they are at their best and most edible. But nobody wants them wrinkled, we used to pull all the wrinkly ones off the shelf and toss them in the dumpster. (I would often consume them myself for a free breakfast, although that was flirting with the rules.) See, the greatest virtue of fruit in a grocery store is uniformity. We did this with all manner of fruits and vegetables, tossing the good with the bad because it was not textbook in appearance. So much waste, so many good things lost (and even homeless shelters and food banks wouldn't take "discards"). It is the price that is paid for prejudicial selection.

And how, may I ask, does one get a certain size on a banana? By discarding those bananas that do not meet the standard.

I think you see where I'm going with this; people, cultural practices, religious beliefs, and other institutions that do not comport with the vision of the elites in the E.U. are simply discarded as wrinkly nectarines. The individual, created by God and endowed with precious, unique talents and gifts, must be forced into a specific mold or discarded. The Industrial Revolution spawned the rise of socialism at the same time and it was largely a mirror of the concept of the machine. Socialists wanted to model society on the machine, with specific parts serving specific roles and not deviating. No machine repurposes a stamper to, say, drill a hole, so why, the thinking went, should a sheet metal worker write copy for a newspaper? It was the old thinking that had given us serfdom; the idea that we should all have our place and every one should remain in it. The arrogance of the post-Enlightenment elites was that the could recreate society as a fine-tuned machine, with themselves as the engineers (because they were so much smarter than everyone else.)

But, but, but, what of multiculturalism? The first criticism of my thesis will be that the Progressives cherish individuality and multiculturalism. Hogwash. What they cherish is group culture, group thinking, group action. We are not individuals but rather members of differing groups who serve their purpose. Just as there are different sized nuts for screws, so too there are different sized members of the nut class, but they are all nuts. (Pun intended.) A nut serves no purpose save as a fastener for a screw. So too, an individual serves no purpose save as a specific member of a group who ultimately performs economic and cultural work. A nut does not change into a nail and neither does an individual change from a member of the gay community, say. He is eternally gay. It's why the idea of psychological counseling to exit the homosexual lifestyle is so bitterly resisted, even when the person in question requests it; it is impossible to move out of the group to which one has been assigned. The Christian view of moral autonomy and personal growth, of freedom, is anathema, so it must be strangled. I have fought for years with Determinists who argue Free Will is nothing but an illusion; they cannot allow Free Will because it allows the individual to leave his assigned space. These people want society to be a gestalt, and ultimately to be like an animal body, with individual cells giving up their independent existence for the good of the collective.

Viktor Frankenstein tried that; it didn't work. And the obscene reanimated collage of corpses is the end result of the Progressives in Europe and elsewhere as well.

What the E.U. and other such Progressive experimental societies offer is a guided, secured carnality. You can have as much sex as you want and not worry about the consequences. You can enjoy your life courtesy of the generous welfare benefits. You can use drugs or watch endless television or blare your music. Join Black Lives Matter and enjoy the rapture of unrestrained rage and resentment. All the while the Progressives will set high walls around you, keeping you from doing too much harm. In the process you will help them destroy the fruit that does not meet their standards, the Christians, the believing Jews, the Constitutionalists, the historians. You get to serve a purpose, the one chosen for you by the engineers, and at the same time have a ball! But you may not think. You may not chart your own course. You may not make your own decisions. You may not grow spiritually or emotionally. In the end you are a tool. We used to call them slaves.

What is the difference between Left and Right? The Left keeps you penned with high guardrails while letting you do whatever you please while the Right lets you walk without them by the light of your own self-discipline. The Progressives think it freedom to run amok and tyranny to expect people to behave themselves.

And that is why everything is regulated in places like the E.U.; to avoid constraining "freedom" everything must be externally constrained. Self control is tyranny to these people.

So multiculturalism is good not because it leads to greater independence and growth but because it shepherds people into holding pens designed by the masters.

We should rejoice at Brexit; it was a moment of sanity in the geopolitical Frankenstein that Liberalism has created. But, as the U.S. is following along the same path, I fear the coming of World Government is nigh. Oh, it may take a few years, but there appears to be nobody to stop it.

We are all Frankenstein's now.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:38 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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