Le Pen and Wilders forge plan to 'wreck' EU from within

Two of Europe's leading far-right populists struck a pact on Wednesdayto build a continental alliance to wreck the European parliament from within, and slay "the monster in Brussels".

Marine Le Pen, the leader of France's rightwing nationalist Front National, and Geert Wilders, the Dutch maverick anti-Islam campaigner, announced they were joining forces ahead of European parliament elections next year to seek to exploit the euroscepticism soaring across the EU after four years of austerity, and the financial and debt crisis.

Le Pen, who has predicted that the EU will collapse as did the Soviet Union, said the aim was to bypass Brussels and restore freedom to the nations and people of Europe.

The rise of populists on the right and the left, from Sweden to Greece, has worried the mainstream EU elites and is already shaping policy ahead of the May elections. At the top level of EU institutions in Brussels, there is talk of "populists, xenophobes, extremists, fascists" gaining around 30% of seats in the next parliament and using that platform to try to paralyse EU policy-making.

"This is a historical day. Today is the beginning of the liberation from the European elite, the monster in Brussels," declared Wilders after meeting Le Pen in the Dutch parliament in The Hague. "We want to decide how we control our borders, our money, our economy, our currency."

The aim of the electoral alliance appears to be to form a Trojan horse in Brussels and Strasbourg: a large parliamentary caucus dedicated to wrecking the very institution that the far-right has entered. To qualify for caucus status, the new group needs at least 25 MEPs from seven countries, which they will get easily on current poll projections, although it is not clear if they can yet muster seven national parties.

"We want to give freedom back to our people," said Le Pen. "Our old European nations are forced to ask the authorisation of Brussels in all circumstances, forced to submit their budget to the headmistress."

Both politicians are currently riding high in the polls in their own countries. A poll last month in France put the Front National at 24% ahead of the governing Socialists and the mainstream conservatives. Wilders' Freedom party, while suffering setbacks in elections last year, is currently leading in Dutch opinion polls.

Eurosceptic parties or those actively committed to wrecking the EU and to ditching the single currency are also expected to do well in Greece, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, Poland and elsewhere in eastern Europe, while Nigel Farage's UK Independence party is being tipped as a possible winner of European elections in Britain.

"As a result of the economic fallout from the eurozone debt crisis, populist parties on both right and left have seen and will likely realise a significant surge in their popularity," said analysts at the Eurasia Group. "The crisis has provided populist and nationalist parties with an excellent opportunity to clean up and modernise their rhetoric. Political parties hitherto thought of as 'nasty' or 'racist' can no longer be considered so."

The pact sealed in The Hague is a big boost for Le Pen who is successfully developing a more moderate image distanced from the overt antisemitism of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and for her campaign to form a broader "European Alliance for Freedom" on the nationalist right.

The effort to pool policies and campaigns has foundered in the past because the various nationalists invariably find enemies in other nations and because far-right parties tend to be dominated by leaders enjoying a cult of personality.

The aim of the Franco-Dutch alliance is to bring in Sweden's Democrats, also rising in the polls, the anti-immigration Danish People's party, Austria's Freedom party of Heinz-Christian Strache, which took more than 20% in recent national elections, and the rightwing Flemish separatists of Vlaams Belang.

By forming a new caucus in the European parliament, the group would gain access to funding, committee seats and chairs, and much more prominent chamber speaking rights. Farage, leading a caucus of 33 MEPs, has exploited the opportunity deftly to raise his European and national profile.

Wilders said they wanted UKIP to join, but Farage has said he will not collaborate with Le Pen because of the Front National's reputation for antisemitism.

There are also several major policy differences that Wilders and Le Pen appeared to be burying on Wednesday which are likely to resurface. Coming from the Dutch libertarian tradition, Wilders is strongly pro-Israel, pro-gay, pro-women's rights. The Front National is seen as homophobic, anti-gay marriage, and no friend of Israel.

The two big policy areas they have in common are anti-immigration and anti-EU. They have ruled out collaborating with more overtly fascistic parties such as Golden Dawn in Greece and Jobbik in Hungary.

The attempt at a concerted campaign comes as support for the EU is haemmorhaging across Europe.

Gallup Europe, following polling in September, found that only 30% viewed the EU positively compared to 70% 20 years ago, and concluded that "the European project has never in its history been as unpopular".

Even in traditionally pro-EU countries, such as Germany, support is atrophying. It remained high among older people but the 25-50 age group was split 50-50 between EU supporters and opponents. Across the EU, eurosceptics outnumbered EU-supporters by 43-40%.

A new study by Mark Leonard and Jose Ignacio Torreblanca for the European Council on Foreign Relations identified five "cleavages feeding centrifugal tendencies in the EU".

The European elections "will be held against a background of economic crisis and loss of confidence in Europe as a political project," the authors found, pointing to the possibility of a "Tea party-like scenario" in which eurosceptic parties capture a large quota of the seats, turn the institution into a "self-hating parliament" which is then "effectively prevented from acting".

Source: http://ow.ly/qOLeq

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Croatians were backstabbed by their ruling class

Around 28% of the Croatian population voted in favor to join the European Union and that was enough to hand over the county's freedom in the hands ofd eurocrats.

But what really happened? Let everyone decide:

Fully aware that the Croatian People do not want to give up their hard earned independence, the ruling elites changed the Croatian Constitution prior to the EU referendum to eliminate the rule which invalidated any referendum unless 50 percent participation was achieved.

Prior to the EU referendum, the Croatian people were subjected to a massive North Korea-style pro–EU propaganda campaign, which relentlessly extolled the benefits and virtues of membership, and denigrated any attempts to say otherwise.

The Government spent huge amounts of public funds to pay for a massive YES campaign, whilst denying any funding to the NO case.

In addition, the European Commision ran its own very expensive YES campaign. State enterprises and corporations were also enlisted. State Television aired pro-EU adverts for free or at discounted rates, Croatia Post home delivered more than 2 million government leaflets for free, and the City of Zagreb provided free EU advertising on its trams.

The Austrian, German and Government-owned electronic and print media ( ie all the media in Croatia) blatantly supported the YES case and made sure that the YES campaign was the only campaign.

The Catholic Church hierarchy, lavishly funded by the State, also openly supported the YES case and seemed unconcerned that there was no democratic public debate and no visible NO case.

Just days before the referendum, Foreign minister Vesna Pusić shamelessly threatened Croatia’s 1.2 million pensioners that they would lose their pensions if they voted against EU membership.

The Zvijezda voting station in Zagreb, which covers several retirement homes with about 1100 pensioners, reported an 80 percent vote in favour of EU membership.”

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God save the Hungarians! The European Union’s Culture war against Hungary – what it really is all about

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In recent days there have been a lot of media reports about Hungary. According to those reports, the country not only is in a very bad shape economically, but there is also a risk that the Government, led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban, was trying to overturn democracy and install a right-wing dictatorship that is completely out of line with “European values”.

The chorus is led by politicians like Luxembourg’s foreign minister Jean Asselborn, who slammed the country as being on its way to becoming “the blemish of the EU”, or the European Parliament’s Vice President (and Lenin-Double) Marin Schulz, who insinuated a lack of legitimacy of the current government when he said: Everybody in Europe is called upon to support the democratic opposition in Hungary.

If information like this is repeated often enough in the mass media, the public will end up believing that something is going seriously wrong in Hungary, and that the international community must join all its forces to get rid of a dangerous oger who is going to erect some kind of neo-fascist regime right in the very center of the continent. It all reminds very much of the hysteria back in 2000, when Austrian conservative leader Wolfgang Schüssel dared to form a new Government that did not include the Socialist Party. In other words: where Social Democrats (or, in the case of Hungary: ex-communists) lose control, the end of democracy must be nigh…

Although this blog only reaches a limited readership, I think I should do what is within my powers to rectify what appears to be a deliberate slandering campaign of the EU’s liberal left against a government that they see as a threat against their cultural hegemony. Presumably, most of our readers are Americans, and hence will (quite understandably) be unfamiliar with Hungarian politics and recent history. Thus, let me explain the situation as follows:

1. While in Germany after WWII there was a process of “de-nazification”, no comparable process took place in most countries of the former Soviet block. There were elections where the communists were voted out of power, but their organisations were never dissolved, nor was there any systematic attempt to cleanse the public administration from former communist party members. In some of those countries, legislation that stands in the most radical contradiction to human rights and democratic values still remains in force today – the most blatant example being the so-called “Benes Decrees” in the Czech Republic. There was no real rupture with the past – instead, the former communists just changed the name of their party, presented themselves at the next elections, and, in certain countries, were back in power fairly quickly. As a matter of consequence, many members of Eastern Europe’s contemporary political elite are in fact former communists (if their pre-1989 party membership was not always motivated by inner conviction, then at least by opportunism). During the enlargement process that preceded the accession of formerly communist countries, the EU did not exert any pressure to address the problem, which, as a consequence, has been imported into the EU’s own institutions: following the EU-accession of those countries, many of those ex-communists have made careers in the EU institutions, including the European Commission and the Parliament (where, quite unsurprisingly, most of them have joined the ranks of the Socialist and Communist groups).

2. In Hungary, the communists actually were clever enough to anticipate the revolution of 1989, and to initiate the transition to democracy before anybody else did. It was communist leaders like Gyula Horn, Imre Poszgay, or Miklos Nemeth, who allowed Eastern German refugees to cross the border to Austria, cut down the iron curtain, delared Hungary’s renunciation of the Warsaw Pact, and called the first democratic elections. This won them the praise and confidence of Western elites, which is why Hungary never came under any pressure from the outside to revisit its comunist past. As a consequence, many communists were never from the posts they had occupied before 1989, but stayed on.

3. In the years following 1989, Hungary has been led by ex-communist governments from 1994 to 1988 and from 2002 to 2010. This has not done the country much good. Although the country was received into the EU as a reward for its role in 1989, many structural reforms have not been carried out. Instead of cutting public spending and initiating thorogh economic reform, subsequent governments (including a conservative government led by Mr. Orban from 1998 to 2002) found it more convenient to “meddle through”. This is why Hungary’s economy today is in such a bad condition.

4. The Socialist government led by Ferenc Gyurcsany acquired a particularly bad reputation when, shortly after his electoral victory in 2006 an audio tape (allegedly from a closed-door meeting of the Socialist Party) surfaced on which he was heard saying that “we have obviously been lying [viz.: about tha state of the country's financial situation] for the last one and a half to two years”. It was at this moment that the public suddenly realized how bad the country’s situation really was. the publication of the tape led to riots on the streets of Budapest, but Gyurcsany refused to resign. However, he was a lame duck from that moment onwards, and the following elections in 2010 resulted in a landslide defeat of the former communists. This time, the Hungarian Electorate wanted a real change. The elections undoubtedly were fair and democratic, but the results for the conservative “Fidesz” Party was truly overwhelming, securing them more than 2/3 of the seats in the National Assembly.

5. The new Prime Minister of Hungary is Viktor Orban, leader of “Fidesz”. With a 2/3 majority in the National Assembly (263 seats out of 386), Fidesz was able to enact a new Constitution. While there can be no serious doubt that this new Constitution corresponds to all democratic standards one could reasonably ask for, it is also true that it does not represent a “compromise”. Here are some quotations that are clearly indicative of those values:

M. Article
(1) Hungary protects the institution of marriage between man and woman, a matrimonial relationship voluntarily established, as well as the family as the basis for the survival of the nation.
(2) Hungary supports child-bearing.
(3) The protection of families is regulated by a super majority law.

II. Article
Human dignity is inviolable. Everyone has the right to life and human dignity; the life of a foetus will be protected from conception.

The Constitution also has a preable beginning with the words “Isten áldd meg a magyart” (“God bless the Hungarians” – the first words of the national anthem).

It is a Constitution based on Christian values. The opposition, consisting of the ex-communist MSZP, the extremist right-wing “Jobbik” Party and the Green-Liberal Party “Politics can be different” (Lehet Más a Politika) voted against it, which however did not prevent it from being adopted with the necessary 2/3 majority.

6. The media attacks against the current Hungarian Government can thus to a large extent be explained as a culture war against the Christian values that are expressed in the new Constitution. The campaign is led by the defeated ex-communists, who, having been victed from power at home, are now mobilizing their allies in the European Parliament to fight back on their behalf. It is no wonder that one of the first charges against Mr. Orban was that he had “imposed” this new Constitution without duly involving the opposition parties. (I commented on this in a previous post. The reproach is nonsensical and can only be explained by the bad faith of those making it. In actual fact there had been a wide public consultation, including with all political parties represented in Parliament. It was the ex-communists who, when they realized that (inter alia) references to God, the family, marriage, and the protection of unborn life were going to be included, pulled out of the process and started to campaign from abroad. In addition, one is tempted to wonder which opposition should have been treated with greater forbearance than actually was the case: the ex-communist “Socialists” scarcely have more votes that the extreme-right “Jobbik”, so that any benefit given to them in terms of institutionalized minority rights would equally have to be given to “Jobbik”. Would that really be a reassurance for the politically correct EU???)

7. Given that issues like the family, the protection of unborn life, etc. do not fall within the competence of the EU, it seems hardly possible that any of the above-quoted provisions violates EU standards. There are no EU rules to legalize abortion (which indeed is illegal in Ireland and Malta, and regulated under rather restrictive terms in Poland), nor is there any obligation for the State to be “secular” (besides Hungary, many other EU Member States, including Germany, Ireland and Greece, invoke God in their respective Constitutions). There also is no obligation under EU law to recognize “same sex marriages” (a point that has, with regard to the European Human Rights Convention, also been clarified by the European Court on Human Rights). Thus all allegations concerning these issues are obviously unfounded. However, it comes ats no surprise that the most radical anti-life and anti-family campaigners (such as the homosexual lobby ILGA and its allies in the European Parliament) are at the forefront of the campaign.

8. The newest diatribes against Hungary’s government deal with issues such as the nomination of new constitutional judges (again, and quite absurdly, the charge is that the opposition – i.e. the ex-communists and the extreme right “Jobbik” – have not been allowed to nominate any judge, which is of course outrageous…), or a new law that provides the government considerable influence on the policies pursued by the country’s central bank, or the new law on mass media. Most of these issues, however, again are clearly outside the competence of the EU. There are no common EU rules on the nomination of constitutional judges (the UK even has no Constitutional Court!), nor are there any common standards to protect the independence of central banks (Hungary is not part of the Euro zone, and even within the Euro zone each country follows different approaches with regard to the role assigned to its central bank).

Certainly, some of the policy choices made by Mr. Orban seem debatable, but it is absurd slander to say that these choices, just because they are not shared by the destitute ex-communist party or the extreme right-wing “Jobbik”, were in contradiction to any “common European values” Hungary has taken a committment to comply with. On the contrary: the above quotations show that it really is Hungary that defends true moral and cultural values against the contemporary “mainstream” represented by the EU establishment.

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Why leftists want to take away your guns

Saw this comment somewhere, but I forgot where. If anyone knows who said it, please let me know so that I can put a reference.

Of course, all of this begs the bigger question: why is the Left so determined to circumvent the 2nd Amendment, to essentially disarm the American populace? The statistics the Left is so fond of citing when promoting their pet causes don’t support their argument for more restrictive gun laws.

Those cities with the greatest restrictions on gun ownership and carry are those with the greatest gun crime rates.

The Left isn’t invested in this issue to save lives. They’re in it because guns are not just symbols of power. Guns are power.

They know if, for example, a certain far-left Democratic Administration attempted to suspend elections in order to, say, maintain majorities in Congress, millions of private citizens with the means to resist would ensure those elections took place, one way or the other.

The American Left is authoritarian and elitist to the core. They envy the technocrats of Beijing and the bureaucrats of Brussels, who can make sweeping, top-down policy decisions unhindered by a pesky, know-nothing electorate.

So no, these aren’t the traditional Truman or JFK Democrats who actually loved freedom and hated socialism.

These are old-school Reds, and if they’re willing to engineer the murder of over 200 people (and counting), they’re capable of anything.

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R.I.P. European democracy, 1945-2011

By Vox Day

Being for the most part historically illiterate, few intellectuals are prepared to admit that modern representative democracy and the basic concept of individual rights are 18th century phenomena that were the byproducts of a Christian society.

They prefer to attribute both institutions to the Enlightenment, despite the fact that it was the Enlightenment that led directly to the revolutionary horrors of the French revolution and it is the Enlightenment that presently serves as the inspiration for the anti-democratic authoritarian bureaucracy of the European Union.

It is written that a house divided against itself cannot stand. In like manner, an intellectual movement cannot reasonably be considered the cause of two diametrically opposed conceptual phenomena.

And it will become increasingly difficult for intellectuals to deny the connection between Christianity and democracy as the recognized, even celebrated, post-Christianity of Europe has been closely followed by European post-democracy.

The development of European post-democracy is much less recognized, is not at all celebrated, and yet it is in some ways further along than the more widely reported continental post-Christianity.

The fact of the matter is that the governments of Europe are no longer any more genuinely democratic than the Roman Empire or the Soviet Union were. In Imperial Rome, the Senate voted on behalf of the former Roman assemblies, but its votes were irrelevant and its authority was nonexistent. In the Soviet Union, the people were permitted to vote, but their preferences were ignored, even in the direct elections instituted in the Gorbachev era.

In a 1991 referendum, a majority of Soviet citizens voted to retain the Union, but in the long anti-democratic tradition of the Soviet Union, their wishes were ignored. This is deeply ironic, considering that a majority of European citizens in nearly every European country would now vote to leave the European Union if given the opportunity, but they are being denied the opportunity to do so by their treasonous national "representatives."

In the United Kingdom, all three major political parties are actively denying the English, Welsh and Scottish peoples the opportunity to vote on continued subjugation to the European Union, despite the fact that all three parties promised a referendum on the EU of one sort or another.

David Cameron, the Tory prime minister who makes the weasely Tony Blair look like an honorable man of his word, is presently facing a near-revolt from members of Parliament who are rightly outraged by his treacherous refusal to make good on the Conservative Party's promise to their increasingly euroskeptical constituents.

In the Eurozone, the state of democracy is even worse, thanks to the latest version of what is improbably described as the "Greek rescue deal." The "stability union," which was announced in Brussels last week, removes the power of national governments to make decisions concerning issues of taxing and public spending.

This means that the two central economic functions of national government, monetary and fiscal policy, are now completely out of government control. It also means that the people of Europe are now subject to taxation without representation, the very state that inspired the American revolution in the first place.

The Enlightenment Ourobos has now devoured its own tail. Christianity may be in decline across the continent, but European democracy is effectively dead. The European political elite is no longer even pretending to be representing the will of the European people in any way, hence the public hand-wringing over what is described as the "democratic deficit." But this is more than a mere deficit; it is the observable death of democracy.

But Americans should not take much satisfaction in the Old World's return to pre-18th century oligarchy. For the same processes that killed European democracy in only 66 years have been actively at work inside the United States for decades.

The false promises of the architects of the European Union are little different than the false promises of politicians like Sen. Edward Kennedy, who declared that the 1965 immigration act would not change the racial composition of America, even though that is exactly what it was designed to do.

And Americans are seeing more and more laws and popular referendums overturned by the will of judges and executive-branch bureaucrats; democracy is not yet dead in America, but it is clearly far from well.

In the Telegraph, Janet Daley conceded that the long battle against the inevitable resurgence of European oligarchy had failed. There is not much time left for Americans to learn that their political play-battles of Democrats and Republicans are not so much futile as beside the point.

Until both left and right unite and turn against the Washington-Wall Street axis of oligarchy, American democracy will continue to die.

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EU Foreign Minister Just Can't Quite Bring Herself to Admit that Christians Were Attacked

Via Ace of Spades

—Gabriel Malor

I bring this up only because it echoes President Obama's statement, wherein he had to make up fictitious Muslim victims because he couldn't just admit that the New Years attacks were against Christians.

As I wrote then, it doesn't fit within the warped worldview of leftists to admit that Christians are being murdered by members of the Religion of Peace^TM.

Talks ended angrily when Italy accused Lady Ashton, the EU's foreign minister, of "excessive" political correctness because she refused to name any specific religious group as a victim of attacks.

Franco Frattini, the Italian foreign minister, demanded an EU response on the persecution of Christians after a New Year suicide bombing at a Coptic church in northern Egypt in which 23 people were killed.

The Egyptian bombing followed attacks in Baghdad and fears, expressed by the Vatican, of persecution leading to a Christian exodus from the Middle East.

Mr Frattini, backed by France, said it pointless to issue statements defending religious tolerance without any references to the specific minority, Christians, that was under attack.

I can hardly believe it; Italy and France are the bulwarks of Western Civilization in the EU, defenders of Christendom? Maybe Western Europe is actually waking up after all.

The EU foreign minister's response:

The EU high representative said she would have to "reflect" further about how to "make sure we recognise individual communities of whatever religion who find themselves being harassed or worse."

"Harassed"? They were blown up while celebrating midnight vigil Mass before a holy day. This dhimmi would simply lay down for the sword.

Posted by Gabriel Malor

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EU Sends Diaries to School Students: Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Jewish, Chinese Holidays All Listed — Christian Holidays Omitted

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European Union: “What is this Christianity you speak of?”

(Daily Mail) — The European Union has sent millions of diaries to schools which list the dates of Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Jewish and Chinese festivals — but omit any mention of Christian celebrations.

In an extraordinary move, three million 2011 notebooks were printed at a cost of £4.4million to the taxpayer. Around 350,000 of the diaries have already been shipped to schools in the UK alone.

There is no record for Christmas, Easter or Lent — despite bureaucrats carefully listing the EU’s self-styled ‘Europe Day’ on May 9.

The EU-manufactured school diaries record Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Jewish and Chinese religious festivals as well as the EU’s self-styled “Europe Day” on May 9. But no mention of Christmas.

The EU was forced to apologise in the wake of the blunder as religious groups expressed their disbelief. John Dalli, consumer commissioner said: ‘We regret this’ and apologised. While the apology is general, there has been a specific, grovelling apology sent to the French government and to the French Catholic Bishop Conferences which had complained directly to Brussels.

European Catholic Commission spokeswoman Johanna Touzel described the mistakes ‘just incredible.’

Continue reading »

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Liberty in the UK

It is long past time for Britain to move from euroskepticism to exiting the European Union:

THE Daily Express today becomes the first national newspaper to call for Britain to leave the European Union. From this day forth our energies will be directed to furthering the cause of those who believe Britain is Better Off Out.

The famous and symbolic Crusader who adorns our masthead will become the figurehead of the struggle to repatriate British sovereignty from a political project that has comprehensively failed.

After far too many years as the victims of Brussels larceny, bullying, over-regulation and all-round interference, the time has come for the British people to win back their country and restore legitimacy and accountability to their political process.

Here is to the Daily Telegraph, the Sun, and other major British newspapers soon following suit. The European Union is an anti-democratic, anti-human liberty, totalitarian institution that is the realization of Napoleon's dream. Like Napoleon's empire, it will collapse, and the sooner Britain is out of it, the better.

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