Nick Clegg is half right. Every American Administration since the Forties has been in favour of a United Europe. That’s why there is one, and that’s why we are in it. The British neocons of the Henry Jackson Society call in their Statement of Principles for a single EU defence “capability” under overall American control, though run day-to-day by Germany, to which white America has her closest ethnic ties.
America has also always been in favour of a United Ireland within NATO and the EU, and the CIA funded the height of the IRA bombing campaign accordingly; there are serious question marks over the deaths of Lord Mountbatten, Robert Bradford and Airey Neave. Legislation for the forced incorporation of Canada has been on the American statute book since the nineteenth century. The Founding Fathers did of course assume that they would get the whole of what was then British territory in the Americas, from the Arctic to Barbados. America has never given up on that aspiration, the end of numerous Commonwealth Realms and British Overseas Territories, which latter’s politicians she loses no opportunity to flatter as if they were independent, no matter what their British people may think. They would not be independent for long, if at all.
One could go on.
We will never again be independent across the Channel unless and until we decide again to be independent across the Atlantic. We need to look to the example of the man who initially kept us out, a very great man indeed, who opposed all four of Nazi occupation, Soviet infiltration, American domination, and the unbalancing of the nascent EU against his country’s interests by means of British accession. All the while, he promoted proper welfare provision, workers’ and consumers’ protection, agriculture, manufacturing, small business, co-operative models of ownership, the gold standard, traditional Christian morality, and continuing ties to the former Empire, and he seriously considered restoring the monarchy. Oh, yes, a very great man indeed.
Where is ours?
If Mr Lindsay meant in his second-last paragraph President De Gaulle, he is partly right; but it remains to be seen whether De Gaulle's undoubted political virtues can counteract his treachery in handing over Algeria to indigenous terrorists who screamed the mantra of "post-colonialism". In other words, blame whitey for everything from political repression to head lice. Tacitus' epigram is relevant to the Algerian FLN's doings: "Solitudinem fecerunt, pacem appelunt" - "They made a desert and they called it peace."
ReplyDeleteOf course, if Mr Lindsay meant someone else altogether in his penultimate paragraph, I apologise.
Oh, no, I meant him, all right. He was not without his faults, but he was still the greatest Frenchman of the twentieth century, and one of the greatest ever.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Mr Lindsay, for your clarification. Fair enough. I'll give De Gaulle credit for this: he did try (in vain) to warn JFK against the dire consequences for genuine anti-Communism of a Vietnamese war.
ReplyDeleteOf course, the trouble with being an intelligent and morally serious (though misguided apropos Algeria) Frenchman, is that such a man finds it impossible to communicate any information whatsoever to any erotomaniac Harvard popinjay with a rich dad, let alone to one such popinjay occupying the White House.