Posted on 05/23/2014 9:37:35 AM PDT by Kaslin
Memorial Day will likely bring alarmist headlines in the elite media about a populist fever raging in Europe, and manifest in the shocking returns from the elections for the European Parliament.
Marine Le Pen's National Front may run first in France, and Nigel Farage's UK Independence Party first in Britain.
What is happening in Europe?
In his unpublished "Leviathan and Its Enemies," my late friend Sam Francis wrote of the coming crisis of the "soft managerial state," of which the European Union is a textbook example.
Oswald Spengler used the word "Civilization" to describe "the terminal phase of a cultural organism," wrote Francis. In 1941, Pitirim Sorokin described the characteristics of a Spenglerian "Civilization":
"[C]osmopolitanism and the megalopolis vs. 'home,' 'race,' 'blood group' and 'fatherland'; scientific irreligion or abstract dead metaphysics instead of the religion of the heart; 'cold matter-of-factness' vs. reverence and tradition and respect for age; internationalist 'society' instead of 'my country' and state (nation); money and abstract values in lieu of earth and real (living) values; 'mass' instead of 'folk'; sex in lieu of motherhood ... and so on."
Between the managerial state and the civilization and culture that preceded it, the polarities are stark.
Yet they mirror the clashes of today as the European Union of Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman's vision exhibits unmistakable symptoms of disintegration and decay.
In a way, this is remarkable.
For undeniably the rise of the EU has coincided with an unprecedented rise in the standard of living for the hundreds of millions from the Atlantic to the Baltic and from the North Sea to the Mediterranean.
Still, though Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Parliament of man" and "Federation of the world" captured the imagination of 19th-and 20th-century one-worlders, the dream has proven incapable of capturing the hearts of European peoples. Who would die for the Brussels bureaucracy?
What are the identifying marks of these populist parties that have sprouted up now in almost every European country?
There is first the rejection of universalism and transnationalism, and a reversion to patriotism and its songs, symbols, holidays, history, myths and legends.
To peoples such as these, the preservation of the separate and unique ethnic and cultural identity of the nation supersedes all claims of supranational organizations, be it the EU or U.N.
This sentiment is reflected not only in fierce resistance to further integration within the EU, but in visceral hostility to further immigration from the Third World, Islamic world or Eastern Europe.
These people want to remain who and what they are.
Even the Swiss last winter voted for an initiative of the People's Party calling for reintroduction of quotas for immigrants from the EU.
A second telltale sign of the new populism is traditionalism and cultural conservatism, reverence for the religious and cultural history and heritage of the nation and its indigenous people.
That victory in the recent Eurovision contest of Conchita, the bearded transvestite drag queen who performed in a gown, though celebrated by much of the European press, sent a message to millions of traditionalists that this is no longer their culture.
Another aspect of the rising populist right, as the New York Times notes, is a grudging admiration for Russia's Vladimir Putin.
Why? Putin not only publicly rejects the moral relativism of the West, under his guidance Russian social legislation is being consciously rooted in traditional Christian concepts of right and wrong.
Putin is the anti-Obama, moving to occupy the cultural-moral vacuum left by America. As we celebrate multiculturalism, LGBT rights, and abortion on demand, Putin repudiates Hollywood values.
When Western politicians and media rail against his annexation of Crimea as a violation of America's rules-based New World Order, Putin invokes patriotism and nationalism in his defense: Crimea belonged to us for 200 years. Most of its people are Russians. They wish to return to Mother Russia. Our warm-water port is there. Americans do not dictate to Russians where Russia's vital interests are concerned.
In the anti-American precincts of Europe, they are applauding.
Yet another specter is haunting Europe: secessionism. Scots, Catalans and Venetians wish to declare independence and become again the countries they once were.
As for the epithets used on the populists, that they are racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, fascist, overuse has caused them to lose their toxicity.
The Eurocrats have cried wolf too often.
How serious is this right-wing populism?
At the least, as the Tea Party has pulled the GOP to the right, these parties are likely to pull center and center-right parties in their direction all across Europe.
Then there is the real possibility not only of a breakup of the EU, but of the breakup of the United Kingdom, the loss of Scotland after 300 years, England's secession from the EU, and the collapse of the Tory Party into Europhiles and Europhobes, all on David Cameron's watch.
Like materialism, consumerism and socialism, transnationalism suffers from the same fatal flaw. It feeds the body and starves the soul. And eventually bored people hear the old calls again.
So, the EU has raised the standard of living? Yes, at the expense of the future. It was done by way of money and work borrowed from the future. Perhaps it is better to have a lower standard of living and live in the moment on what you can afford. I doubt anybody was starving before. But when they can no longer make the payments on the second Mercedes and the holiday home in Rome they will starve.
Wouldn’t it be ironic if Leon Trotsky’s “internationalist” vision — a nation of ideas rather than geographical boundaries — found its realization in a massive conservative reaction to the perversion of our world by liberals? Around the globe, people who have seen their values sundered by godless, amoral humanism rise up under one banner and launch the Glorious Revolution that restores us to sanity.
Seriously. In a world where a flaming faggot cross-dresser drag queen with a beard can win anything but a lifetime supply of straitjackets, haven’t we reached the “Caligula Point,” where even the most perverse among us has to pause at the logical conclusion of such depravity?
Devoutly to be wished ...
For those who don’t know, the title of the piece alludes to the opening line of The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels, published in 1848:
A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism.
Good. Old Arlen haunted the U.S. Senate for years. Let his ghost haunt somewhere else for a while. One of the deciding votes for the curse of Obamacare!!
I haven't actually seen much sign that this is the case. I'd be interested to know what Buchanan is referring to here - surely there is little sign that the GOPe has decided to promote smaller government, less spending, fewer abuses against individual rights, immigration restrictions; in short, lately there seems to me to be more a collective sigh of relief that they haven't yet been forced to address these issues in any way but accommodation to the wilder partisans on the Left. Maybe I'm being distracted by the triumphalist drumbeat in the Beltway press over the primary elections, but I don't think so.
And herein lies the rub.
The Left wants to portray the GOP as if the Tea Party HAS taken control.
And we see how dysfunctional the GOP is, and therefore that has rubbed off on the Tea Party movement as a whole. And the Tea Party has no way of controlling the message....and as a result, the enemy on the Left, has been allowed to define them in the minds of the masses.
This is why we must look to what the UKIP is doing in Britain.....They could have chosen to work within the Conservative Party as well....But would the Tories ever have allowed Nigel Farage to be their spokesman? Never.
As a result, the UKIP is completely in control of their message. They define what they are, and not their enemies, although the BBC and the other statist media are trying their darndest to do so.
I love the use of the phrase "indigenous people'. The left fawns over the rights of indigenous people when they are oppressed by Europeans, and then fawns over the Islamic invaders when the Europeans themselves are the indigenous people.
His conclusion that transnationalism “feeds the body but starves the soul” is woefully wrong.
Transnationalism is actually reactionary to prosperity and success. It keeps the poor down, and drags the middle classes down into poverty. It is an exclusive diet of meringue, just whipped egg whites and sugar. And all paid for with crushing debt.
it doesn’t feed the body. It gives it diabetes.
Excellent points. All.
May God Bless the revival of patriotism & ethnic spirit in Europe. The answer to War is not perpetual servitude to crack-pot theories, but rather the traditional American foreign policy from Washington & Jefferson, which once made America the envy of the world, and the most loved nation in human history. (We are one of the most hated now, because we have allowed our home grown theorists and crackpots to push the suppression of heritage on the nations we once treated with actual respect."
Let us return to a leadership, which applies the lessons from our own early success, and stop following the Pied Piper of Humanist insanity back to a modern equivalent of Nimrod's insane venture at Babel. Every people have a right to develop & build on a culture that reflects them, not some academic theorists cloud-borne day dream.
William Flax
The apparent inconsistency, to which you refer, actually reflects a number of involved factors.
1. For some unfortunate reason, there is a considerable amount of empirical evidence that peoples of White European stock, are more easily indoctrinated with guilt complexes than other peoples. Thus one of the neurotic impulses that is destroying the West is this vulnerability.
2. The compulsive egalitarians, on the other hand--that is the aggressive ones, rather than the guilt driven ones--are actively seeking to level the high achievers in their own lands. This not only takes the form of hand-wringing over income and/or social "inequality," but the now all too familiar refrain of blaming White European civilization for all the world's woes.
We need to wake up everyone who is still capable of rational, experience driven, analysis to the reality that what has been going on is neither altruistic, rational or ever likely to generate anything ultimately beneficial to any nation. It is a wrong approach, generated by people whose fears & compulsions override their reason.
William Flax
Nationalism will always trump internationalism. It helped to Kill the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union and will drive a stake into the heart of the EU. All fueled by the Mulicultural experiment that didn’t work. We must thank the Islamic hot heads and fanatics for this. They woke up Europe in a way nothing else could. The Continent will go Conservative—and back to their roots. The big losers—the cultural elites and Liberal/Communists. They are on the wrong side of history. Watch as the Nations re-form into new shapes and a new history.
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