Jay Nordlinger finally discovers that the EU isn’t so wonderful:
Begin with a quick word about the EU — about which I am awakening, at last. Years ago, I would hear my British friends — very bright, very balanced — talk about the EU in the most severe terms. They said it was a kind of Soviet Union in the making, and would lead to a host of ills. Frankly, I thought this talk was a little overblown. I thought it could be interpreted as hysterical. But my friends knew far more than I, and I was given pause.
Now I am something like a believer. As David Pryce-Jones tells us in our current issue — his piece is found here (subscription required) — Vladimir Bukovsky and Pavel Stroilov have put out a pamphlet on the EU. It bears the arresting title EUSSR. I wish to quote from the introduction (and bear in mind that Bukovsky was one of the leading Soviet dissidents, a great, clear-eyed man):
For anyone even remotely familiar with the Soviet system, its similarity with the developing structures of the European Union, with its governing philosophy and “democracy deficit,” its endemic corruption and bureaucratic ineptitude, is striking. For anyone who lived under the Soviet tyranny or its equivalents across the world, it is frightening. Once again we observe with growing horror the emergence of a Leviathan that we had hoped was dead and buried, a monster that destroyed scores of nations, impoverished millions, and devastated several generations before finally collapsing. Is it inevitable? Is the human race bent on self-destruction and doomed to repeat the same mistake time and again until it dies in misery? Or is the EU, indeed, simply a clone of the USSR imposed upon reluctant nations of Europe by the same political forces that created the first one?
Look, if Bukovsky talks this way, who am I to scoff? He may not be right — but anyone who ignored him would be a fool.
Hitler used tanks, the EU used banks. But the end result is the same, fascist rule across Europe. It is a mystery to me why it is considered more desirable that one’s totalitarian rulers be faceless bureaucrats instead of ranting lunatics. At least with the ranting lunatics, they’ll tell you what they’re going to do ahead of time.