RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/letter-from-brussels-the-belly-of-the-eurobeast/

Visiting Brussels is like visiting an acquaintance who is well informed but whose company you don’t enjoy. It is not fun but it can be useful. The European Union is in a state of latent crisis which has the potential to turn acute at any moment, but the massive bureaucratic machine in its capital pretends it is business as usual. Moscow felt this way in the late 1980’s.

The mandarins at the top are aware that the peasants are restive. Their current line is that the European Union is under threat from “populists,” evil people who first spread and then exploit supposedly irrational phobias on immigration, economy, sovereignty etc. These “far-right, racist nationalists” risk making the EU “ungovernable” if they win big at the European elections in May, but voters may yet turn to them in revolt against the mainstream European politicians, economic commissioner Pierre Moscovici warned a week ago. “Europe is strong but the European idea is under threat,” he said, adding the EU was “threatened by political disagreements between member states on the meaning of the European project.” The challenge, Mr Moscovici said, isn’t’ just to save Europe but to “remake” it: “We need to give the European idea new meaning and ambition . . . There is tension between those who want to continue the European adventure and those who are fighting it, and it’s a frontal battle.”

To refresh my understanding of “the European adventure” as defined by M. Moscovici and his ilk, I walked past the project’s headquarters on Monday morning. There is a strange statue outside the soon-to-be-contested European Parliament. A heroic female figure (supposedly “Europa Goddess,” according to the official EU guidebook) is triumphantly holding high the euro sign; a man and a woman, emerging from the lower folds of her tunic, vainly reach up with their arms. Whatever the meaning of this eerie image, it is unlikely to inspire the masses with “new meaning and ambition.” The statue, albeit on a more modest scale and grimmer in spirit, exudes the temperament of the 1937 “Worker and Kolkhoz Woman” in Moscow. This is unsurprising: the essence of the EU has always been socialist and (velvet) totalitarian.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/03/reflections-on-socialism-and-nationalism/

THE relationship between socialism and nationalism has become a no-go zone for the Left in the West, where it has loudly proclaimed its internationalism, laid out the welcome mat for Third World “refugees” and blamed supposedly impending climate catastrophe on the bad economic choices of fellow citizens, seeking to infuse them with a sense of guilt for their alleged racism, xenophobia and greed. All this at the same time the Left seeks to exploit minority grievances and weaken the bonds of patriotism and identification with the nation state. For those with an hour to spare, this SBS discussion of arranged marriages might serve as a guide to the mainstreaming of ideas and practices once shunned as unacceptable in a former Australia.

In one sense, this might seem to be a reversion to classical revolutionary Marxism, except for the fact that a key element of the dogma, international class struggle, has gone missing. Indeed, in recent years the West’s working class has become decidedly hostile to the leftist programme. Look to Trump’s 2016 presidential victory, Brexit and the ongoing of Yellow Vests protest in France. All this and more has seen the Left in need of an alternative. If the current population refuses to give its consent, then a new population should be imported under the cover of humanitarian blather. Perhaps Bertolt Brecht’s famous poem, The Solution, has a new relevance today:

After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

What all this might indicate is that socialism sans nationalism can only be imposed on advanced Western democracies if a revolutionary elite succeeds with a massive programme of population replacement. Historically, Marxist-Leninist regimes, devoted to international revolution across national borders, had to rely on coercion and terror. Such methods “worked” in Russia and China, neither of which had any developed structure of civil society. Alternatively, such regimes were “occupation regimes”, as in Eastern Europe, imposed by imperial Soviet power.