“Tackling the EU Empire” By Anthony Coughlan
Review By Rodney Atkinson
http://teameurope.co/docs/EU_critical_Handbook.pdf
“Sometimes I like to compare the EU as a creation to the organization of empire. We have the dimension of empire.”
Such were the words, quoted by Anthony Coughlan in this publication, of the EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso in 2007 and typify the hubris of the corporatist technocratic elite put in place by post second world war politicians to subjugate democratic nation states to the new European order.
That order had been defeated in 1945 but many of those same German imperialists and European fascists were instrumental in conceiving, founding and indeed – for instance in the figure of the Nazi Walter Hallstein, the first President of the European Commission – in the management of the then “European Economic Community” (the same term used by the Hitler regime to describe their own 1942 blueprint for Europe under German hegemony). That blueprint was reproduced in the structure of the post war EEC, now the European Union and as my own latest book And into the Fire – fascist elements in post war Europe and the development of the European Union (see this site and on Amazon) clearly shows, with the same elements in media, supranational business, US industry, intelligence services and the “major” political parties promoting the corporatist anti democratic Eurostate as enthusiastically as they supported Hitler’s “building of Europe”.
In his handbook of critical facts about the European Union, “Tackling the EU Empire” Anthony Coughlan of Trinity College, Dublin, a decades long fighter for democratic nationhood in Europe, emphasises rightly what very few opponents of this Leviathan have grasped – that the ever smaller but ever more powerful clique of corporatists who have built this Empire come from left right and centre – just as their democratic opponents come from left right and centre.
The principal opponents have been entrepreneurs (both intellectual and economic!) academics, a few journalists and (at first at least a few) mavericks in political parties, the libertarian right and the Marxist left. The great weight of supranational and big business, the civil service, the corporatist “major” political parties and supranational organisations like the UN have had the levers of power, the tools of administration, the patronage of Government and the propaganda machine of the EU itself to create this monstrosity.
As Coughlan in his “handbook” rightly asserts the origins of the EU were not so much the cause of peace between Germany and France but the cause of pursuing the cold war between the USA and the Soviet Union with the US congress passing a motion in 1947 to encourage the founding of a United States of Europe.
The form at least of the European Union did sound peaceful with the 1949 German constitution speaking of Germany as “an equal partner in a united Europe”. But the post war “peaceful” Nazis and fascists had “set the points” for German dominance and for a post democratic Europe. Most post war German leaders – both the “former” Nazis like Kiesinger and Heuss and the power hungry Kohl and Merkel – boarded the train for which the points had been set. So today we see a totally dominant Germany – although the recent suicidal decision of Merkel to invite an uncontrolled wave of mainly islamic unassimilable migrants into Europe could mean the end both of German economic stability and political influence as the EU collapses, as all empires do, from a completely unexpected cause!
There always was an alternative Europe, building on the cultural triumphs of music, literature, science and industry developed within the European nation states and statelets over centuries. But as Coughlan rightly asserts:
This classical Europe, which is synonymous with much of what is best in human civilization, is the opposite of the centralised “Europe” of the Brussels bureaucracy, with its mania for imposing uniformity and “harmonization” by means of its supranational laws.
In this process of course there is a certain kind of arrogant democrat who thinks that nothing good or progressive or democratic happens in society unless he has organised it through the State. And he makes a fine bedfellow for the fascist and corporatist who sees all solutions in the removal of parliamentary interference, letting big Government talk to big business and big unions and as Hitler asserted “putting capital at the service of labour” – while he himself relied on the donations and power of e.g. Krupp, IG Farben, Thyssen, Ford, BMW and the propaganda publications of Bertelsmann – all of them particularly active in support of the EU State today! Anthony Coughlan writes:
Lust for world power is the mainspring of EU supranationalism. National democracy is to be sacrificed to that end….
I myself recall debating with a eurofanatical Tory MP when, increasingly angered by the goadings of the audience, suddenly burst out “But Europe is about power – it is power that we want”. There was a shocked silence. Since then, as the EU State has increased its grip on once free peoples, leading bureaucrats have often burst out in assertions of power and admissions of duplicity – as the above Barrosso quote shows. Many more are revealed in my books Europe’s Full Circle and Fascist Europe Rising!
Today Anthony Coughlan’s book serves as a valuable text for reminding ourselves of the essential background to the EU, the trail of ever more disastrous European Treaties, its true character, the myths of its promoters and the rise of its peoples against the corporatist State.
Of particular value is a summary of the various supranational institutions of Europe – The EU, the EU Commission, the European Parliament, the Council of Ministers, the European Court of Justice, the European Council and the build up of EU ambassadors and EU military power. The smagasbord of confusing centres of power is typical of totalitarian regimes. The EU’s plethora of external “Association Agreements”, Economic Partnerships and the European Neighbourhood policy which intimidate non EU members all remind us of how the Nazis behaved in the 1930s and 1940s and how today these “agreements” are pushing ever further Eastwards.
I heartily recommend this handbook – a valuable reference in this year of decision.
