A libertarian strikes back

Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 10 June 2005 06:44.

To those who have sent MR this latest piece from William S. Lind at Antiwar.com, thank you. It is not overly long and my comment at this stage is superfluous. So I reproduce it here as it stands ...

The recent votes in France and the Netherlands against the proposed constitution of the European Union are not merely political phenomena. They represent significant actions in the development of Fourth Generation war. Why? Because the root cause of Fourth Generation war is a crisis of legitimacy of the state, and the two referenda saw the French and Dutch people rebel against their elites’ efforts to empty the state of its content.

Understanding what happened in these two votes requires a counterintuitive mindset. Normally, we would think of elites as representing the state and the common people rebelling against the state. That is not what happened here. On the contrary, the elites represent the destruction of the state and the French and Dutch people rebelled in defense of their historic, national states. In effect, the aristocracy was crying “Down with the king!” while the peasants shouted “Vive le roi!” (which happened quite frequently during both the French and Russian Revolutions).

Today’s European political elites, like most of their counterparts elsewhere, do not give their primary allegiance to the state. Rather, their first loyalty goes to a New World Order that advocates world government (even the EU is just a way station on that journey), a globalized economy in which European and North American living standards are averaged with those of the Third World, and the general abolition of religions, customs, and traditions in favor of a culture based on commercialism, materialism, and sensual pleasure. Western elites, especially Europe’s, add one more element: the ideology of cultural Marxism, the Marxism of the Frankfurt School, which says that the white race (especially males), the Christian religion, and Western civilization are all evils that must be repressed and, in time, eradicated. In the 1930s, the British novelist Aldous Huxley wrote a book about that kind of future; he called it Brave New World.

The Western political elites began to transfer their allegiance away from the state after World War I, in response to the horrors the state created at places like Ypres, the Somme, and Verdun. They intensified their new loyalty to the internationalist superstate after World War II, and began the slow, painstaking creation of actual superstates in the form of the United Nations, the World Court, the Common Market (now the European Union), and similar bodies. They expected that in time, the common people – the plebs, the narod, the riah – would follow the wise example of their betters and give their loyalty too to Brave New World.

But they were wrong. As the French and Dutch referenda showed, ordinary people would rather offer their loyalty to something real, their historic nation-state, than to an abstract scheme in which they rightly perceive totalitarian tendencies (a number of former Soviet dissidents are warning that the European Union looks increasingly like the Soviet Union). Das Volk prefers its own culture to the poison of “multiculturalism,” its own neighbors to hordes of semi-barbaric immigrants and its own customs to regulations handed down by Gosplan bureaucrats in Brussels.

How will the Brave New World elites respond to this unenlightened effrontery on the part of the great unwashed? By realizing they made a mistake – the mistake of letting ordinary people have a say about their future. They will hem and haw for a bit, slow things down for a little while and then resume their previous course, this time making sure there are no referenda. Brave New World only holds elections when they offer voters no real choice other than more Brave New World.

And so the state’s legitimacy will crumble further, and Fourth Generation war will spread, including in Europe. Denied the option of giving their loyalty to their historic state and its way of life, ordinary people will indeed transfer that loyalty, not to Brave New World but to a plethora of causes, ideologies, religions, regions, ethnic groups, tribes, and gangs. And for these new loyalties, they will fight.

Like the French Bourbons, the Euro-elites forget nothing and they learn nothing. The future does not belong to them.

Tags: Political analysis

Comments:

Posted by john rackell on Fri, 10 Jun 2005 11:22 | #

Below is what the elites have in store for the US per Lou Dobbs on June 9. Btw William Lind doesn’t hold the CFR in much esteem.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0506/09/ldt.01.html

DOBBS: ...Now, incredibly, a panel sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations wants the United States to focus not on the defense of our own borders, but rather create what effectively would be a common border that includes Mexico and Canada.

Christine Romans has the report.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): On Capitol Hill, testimony calling for Americans to start thinking like citizens of North America and treat the U.S., Mexico and Canada like one big country.

ROBERT PASTOR, IND. TASK FORCE ON NORTH AMERICA: The best way to secure the United States today is not at our two borders with Mexico and Canada, but at the borders of North America as a whole.

ROMANS: That’s the view in a report called “Building a North American Community.” It envisions a common border around the U.S., Mexico and Canada in just five years, a border pass for residents of the three countries, and a freer flow of goods and people.

Task force member Robert Pastor.

PASTOR: What we hope to accomplish by 2010 is a common external tariff which will mean that goods can move easily across the border. We want a common security perimeter around all of North America, so as to ease the travel of people within North America.

ROMANS: Buried in 49 pages of recommendations from the task force, the brief mention, “We must maintain respect for each other’s sovereignty.” But security experts say folding Mexico and Canada into the U.S. is a grave breach of that sovereignty.

FRANK GAFFNEY, CENTER FOR SECURITY POLICY: That’s what would happen if anybody serious were to embrace this strategy for homogenizing the United States and its sovereignty with the very different systems existing today in Canada and Mexico.

ROMANS: Especially considering Mexico’s problems with drug trafficking, human smuggling and poverty. Critics say the country is just too far behind the U.S. and Canada to be included in a so-called common community. But the task force wants military and law enforcement cooperation between all three countries.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Indeed, an exchange of personnel that bring Canadians and Mexicans into the Department of Homeland Security.

ROMANS: And it wants temporary migrant worker programs expanded with full mobility of labor between the three countries in the next five years.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ROMANS: The idea here is to make North America more like the European Union. Yet, just this week, voters in two major countries in the European Union voted against upgrading—updating the European constitution. So clearly, this is not the best week to be trying to sell that idea.

DOBBS: Americans must think that our political and academic elites have gone utterly mad at a time when three-and-a-half years, approaching four years after September 11, we still don’t have border security. And this group of elites is talking about not defending our borders, finally, but rather creating new ones. It’s astonishing.

Posted by Braveheart on Fri, 10 Jun 2005 11:25 | #

Belgian Foreign Minister De Gucht compared Dutch prime-minister Balkenende with a mix of stiff middle-class mentality and Harry Potter, because Balkenende had organised a referendum about the European Constitution that ended in tatters. This caused a diplomatic row. The Belgian ambassador was summoned.

And this is the Belgian way, because Walloon socialist Di Rupo forbade a referendum:

Meanwhile, in each popularity poll, De Gucht’s VLD party is sinking further…

Flanders,

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 10 Jun 2005 13:49 | #

Interesting link, John. Thank you.

Americans must think that our political and academic elites have gone utterly mad

But the elites are not mad. Ther are transnationalist - they disdain “the people”, “the nation” and the ties of the heart between the two. They are united by ideas, values, constitutionalism. They are race-blind, have not read The Bell Curve and ignore all inconvenient social data. They have lived on the advancing wave of liberalism for a very long time. They know nothing else ... indeed, reinforce one another in the belief that there is nothing else.

They cannot be redeemed. They must be deposed.

Posted by Geoff Beck on Fri, 10 Jun 2005 14:24 | #

I’m a huge fan of William S. Lind, his articles also appear at Lew Rockwell.

If you like Lind, you’ll love Martin Van Creveld

Posted by JW Holliday on Fri, 10 Jun 2005 15:36 | #

Brave New World only holds elections when they offer voters no real choice other than more Brave New World.

But, of course. That is exactly what the “democracy” that John Ray and George Bush love so much means in practice. The politicians do not listen to the people, they try and make it the other way around. Salter’s support of democracy is one of the few real weaknesses of his book.

Posted by Svigor on Fri, 10 Jun 2005 18:50 | #

What’s interesting is how everyone in America mouths democracy but lives under a republic, and at the same time true democracy is for the first time really possible for large nations.

Of course, democracy is actually rule by the first (formerly the fourth) estate.

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 10 Jun 2005 20:11 | #

The only way to stop the present abuses of OMOV by the media and political elite is to construct a constitutional balance of interests, and introduce thereby a clearly differentiated scale of franchise.

Home ownership, business ownership, tax paying and maybe share ownership are all moral bases for additional franchises. Such a balance of interests would weight the electorate away from left politics. Over time advanced liberalism would wither away and proper Conservatism would begin to reappear. Nationalism would be a virtue, not a sin and European Man would be permitted to make for himself the life he pleases.