What Europe Really Needs
With thanks to Angantyrs hjørne:What Europe Really Needs
For an entire generation, the EU has created a totalitarian monster of its own, spewing out regulations literally by the million and invading every corner of economic and social life. The results have been dire: An immense bureaucracy in Brussels, each department of which is cloned in all the member capitals. Above all, règlementation of national economies on a totalitarian scale. Hence it is not surprising that Europe, which grew rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s, before the EU got going, has slowly lost pace since Brussels took over its direction. Short working hours and huge social security costs that have produced high unemployment, over 10% in France and higher in Germany than at any time since the Great Depression which brought Hitler to power. It is natural that high and chronic unemployment generates a depressive anger which finds many expressions. One, in Europe today, is anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. Another is exceptionally low birthrates, lower in Europe than anywhere else in the world except Japan. If present trends continue, the population of Europe will be less than the United States by midcentury. Europe has turned its back not only on the U.S. and the future of capitalism, but also on its own historic past. Europe was essentially a creation of the marriage between Greco-Roman culture and Christianity. Brussels has, in effect, repudiated both. There was no mention of Europe's Christian origins in the ill-fated Constitution, and Europe's Strasbourg Parliament has insisted that a practicing Catholic cannot hold office as the EU Justice Commissioner. In short, the EU is not a living body, with a mind and spirit and animating soul. And unless it finds such nonmaterial but essential dimensions, it will soon be a dead body, the symbolic corpse of a dying continent.
posted by Unknown @ 12:44 PM
1 Comments:
There is an inherent need for people to believe in something greater and more powerful than themselves. If it is an idealized, benevolent "other", it is felt as a protective God or an all encompassing state that protects and feeds the frightened individual. If the all-powerful other is devalued, it is the Devil or the evil American or Jew. (Even in this case, there is a feeling of safety since the controlling power, even while inimical, at least protects one from the vicissitudes of fate/randomness/chaos.) When people deny God, they invariably deify some other construct. It is instructive that the left holds on to their beliefs despite a hundred years of failed experiments. It is a religious belief as powerful as the most fervent Islamist's belief in Allah.
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