In his op-ed in The Washington Post, Chris Grayling,
leader of the House of Commons, made the case for British withdrawal from the
European Union — in terms Americans can understand.
Would you accept, Grayling
asks, an American Union of North and South America, its parliament sitting in
Panama, with power to impose laws on the United States, and a high court whose
decisions overruled those of the U.S. Supreme Court?
Would you accept an American
Union that granted all the peoples of Central and South America and Mexico the
right to move to, work in, and live in any U.S. state or city, and receive all
the taxpayer-provided benefits that U.S. citizens receive?
This is what we are subjected to under the EU, said Grayling.
And as you Americans would never cede your sovereignty or
independence to such an overlord regime, why should we?
Downing Street’s reply: Prime Minister David Cameron says
leaving the EU could cost Britain a lot of money and a loss of influence in
Brussels.
The heart versus the wallet. Freedom versus security.
While Barack Obama, Cameron, and Angela Merkel are pulling for
Britain to vote to remain in the EU, across Europe, transnationalism is in
retreat, and tribalism is rising.
As Britain’s Independence Party and half the Tory Party seek to
secede from the EU, the Scottish National Party is preparing a new referendum
to bring about Scotland’s secession.
The strongest party in France is the National Front of Marine Le
Pen. In Austria’s presidential election, Norbert Hofer of Jorg Haider’s Freedom
Party came within an eyelash of becoming the first European nationalist head of
state since World War II.
The Euroskeptic Law and Justice Party is in power in Warsaw, as
is the Fidesz Party of Viktor Orban in Budapest, and the Swiss People’s Party
in Bern. The right-wing Sweden Democrats and Danish People’s Party are growing
stronger.
In 2015, Merkel, Time’s Person of the Year, admitted a million
Middle East refugees. This year, Merkel flipped and paid a huge bribe to
Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan to keep Syrian refugees from crossing the Aegean
to the Greek islands and thence into Europe.
In Germany, too, nationalism is resurgent as opposition grows to
any new bailouts of the La Dolce Vita nations of Club Med. The populist AfD
party has made major strides in German state elections.
While the rightist parties in power and reaching for power are
anti-EU, anti-Islamic and anti-immigrant, the secessionist movements roiling
Scotland, Spain, Belgium and Italy seek rather the breakup of the old nations
of Europe along ethnonational lines.
By enlisting in these parties of the right, what are the peoples of
Europe recoiling from and rebelling against? Answer: The beau ideal of
progressives — societies and nations that are multiracial, multiethnic,
multicultural and multilingual.
Across Europe, the tribalists are rejecting, in a word, diversity.
And what are they
seeking?
God-and-country,
blood-and-soil people, they want to live with their own kinfolk, their own
kind. They do not believe in economics uber alles. And if democracy will not
deliver the kind of country and society they wish to live in, then democracy
must be trumped by direct action, by secession.
This is the spirit behind
Brexit.
The is the spirit that drove the Irish patriots of 1919, who
rose against British rule, though they were departing the greatest empire on
earth in its moment of supreme glory after the Great War, to begin life among
the smallest and poorest
countries in all of the Europe.
What is happening in Europe today was predictable and predicted.
At the turn of the century, in “The Death of the West,” I wrote,
“Europe has begun to die. The prognosis is grim. Between 2000
and 2050, world population will grow by more than three billion to over nine
billion people, but this 50 percent increase in population will come entirely
in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as one hundred million people of European
stock vanish from the earth.”
Europeans are vanishing, as the peoples of the Maghreb and the
Middle East, South Asia and the sub-Sahara come to fill the empty spaces left
by aging and dying Europeans whose nations once ruled them.
Absent the restoration of border controls across Europe, and
warships on permanent station in the Med, can the inexorable invasion be
stopped? Or is “The Camp of the Saints” the future of Europe?
An open question. But if the West is to survive as the unique
civilization it has been, its nations must reassume control of their destinies
and control of their borders.
Britain ought not to go gentle into that good night the EU has
prepared for her. And a great leap to freedom can be taken June 23.
Trooping to the polls, the cousins might recall the words of
Vera Lynn, 76 years ago, as the Battle of Britain was engaged:
“There’ll always be an England,
“And England shall be free,
“If England means as much to you
“As England means to me.”
