The final joke of the brilliant British comedian, Bob Monkhouse, before he died ran: “Everybody laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well, they’re not laughing now.”
Everybody in the EU laughed when the UK unveiled its plans to relocate illegal immigrants to Rwanda for adjudication over their future. Well, they’re not laughing now, as the EU plans to set up similar deportation camps in neighbouring countries, such as Serbia, Albania and Moldova. What do these countries have in common with Rwanda? A curiously elastic attitude to what for most of the EU is a binding dogma, namely “human rights”. A Brussels’ summit will soon examine “innovative solutions” to Europe’s migrant problem, as rising popular anger at the transformation of many areas within Europe’s cities into lawless favelas makes the issue now politically unavoidable.
So, as the EU wakes up to the horrors of uncontrolled mass-movements resulting from societal collapses across Africa and western Asia, it looks to European countries that are less ethically scrupulous than are existing members of the EU. The reward for their implicit rejection of the binding dogmas that have so cowed EU countries is a hastened entry into the EU. Ah yes, as in St Augustine’s plea: “Lord, make me virtuous, but not just yet.”
The EU from the outset was a patrician conceit, a Salonista confection that looked on the feelings of ordinary people as the reactionary nostalgia of an ineducable rabble. The real project of its legal ruling-caste was encoded within the cerebrations of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), created by the Council of Europe but embraced by the EU. If you want to know what it’s like being an insect being caught in the lethal glue of a Venus fly-trap, then bid farewell to those you love and allow yourself to be caressed by lethal tentacles of the ECHR.
The core of the ECHR is not the rights of citizens or even the law but the practice of the law. Throughout history, people being subject to the rule of a predictable law has defined civilised government, whereas the duty of the ECHR is to make people subject to the rule of lawyers. Contrary to popular belief, the European Court of Human Rights is not a legal expression of the EU, though the EU forces all member states to accept its power, but a jurisprudential hallucination of how the courts of a United Europe might one day work. This is why it has judges from Ukraine, Russia, Turkey, Greece and Cyprus, all of which are at war – either suspended or real – with their nearest neighbours. In other words, this is how the laws of Europe might work in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s opiate-filled dream before the rude arrival of the visitor from Porlock.
Or, In an insane EU did Strasbourg’s ghouls, a stately moral maze decree, where natives be treated as simple fools, with aliens above a nation’s rules, arriving on a lawyers’ sea.
The outcome has been exquisitely simple; the edicts emanating from the grisly caste of legal priests that inhabit Strasbourg’s courts are superior to the laws passed by the native parliaments within the Strasbourg imperium. The over-arching theological justification for this, via the Council of Europe — yes, I know, I know — is the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights, which was brought down from the bloodied Mount Sinai of the Second World War. The declaration was the seed from which the European Convention on Human Rights sprang two years later, and which the ECHR enforces.
Though no useful legal lessons could possibly be learnt from that unbridled festival of civilisational cannibalism, that is precisely what a traumatised UN attempted to do, while at the same time not offending one of the two main authors of that barbarism, Stalin’s Soviet Union. With such a hopelessly contaminated birth right, no great and enduring wisdom could possibly emerge, and the declaration’s opening statement reveals both its deeply flawed intellectual credentials and its absurd aspirations.
“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”
This is pious twaddle. Babies are not born free, equal in dignity and human rights. All are born naked and will die within hours without the milk and warmth of their mothers, protected by their fathers. Many are born naturally deformed, and far from being equipped with reason and conscience at birth, these are qualities, if they exist at all, that are inculcated by the societies into which they are born. “Conscience” is a Judaeo-Christian creation, wholly alien to the Confucian or Shinto concepts of duty and shame, never mind the various social mores of the Australian Aborigine, the American Sioux, the Kalahari Koi or the Yanomami of the Amazon.
Article Two is where the mischief really deepens. This declares (amongst other things) that everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in the declaration, without distinction of any kind such as their national or social origin. The only possible interpretation of this is that once an immigrant, legal or otherwise, comes under the jurisdiction of a court (rather than of the unconditional and possibly brutal negatives of a border official) the utterly unreal aspirations of the 1948 Charter come into legal play. This is even more emphatically so once the unchartered emotions of doctrinaire liberalism are unleashed upon proceedings, which overall mean that anyone arriving in a state, legally or otherwise, has as many rights to the institutions and benefits of that state as those born in it.
Such indiscriminate and obligatory legal egalitarianism only applies in Europe and North America, while the rest of the world looks on the 1948 Charter with the same amused and cynical condescension of the Soviet Union or later Communist China. In other words, this a law that only applies to the law-abiding.
The first deed of the new and zealously pious British Home Secretary, Labour’s Yvette Cooper, was to cancel the Tory government’s option of processing illegal immigrants masquerading as asylum seekers in Rwanda, which was presumably chosen because it has a happy history of being rather indifferent to “”human rights” as well as being immune to intervention by Britain’s priestly caste of judges. Even as she was doing that, European politicians, viewing the rise of anti-immigration political movements in every country from the Gulf of Norway to the Aegean, realised the oblivion awaiting those of their number who failed to smell the coffee. What to do? How about some European Rwandas, with the EU using lesser, more lawless countries close to hand to do their dirty work for them? Quite, as in, Lord, make me virtuous, but just not yet.
Since the capture of almost the entire journalistic trade by graduates of left-liberal media colleges, the term “far-right” has become a standard media-description of any sceptics of the virtues of wholesale immigration and ever-growing welfare states. Which was why this writer has repeatedly scoffed at the use of the “far-right” label attached to AfD, the Alternative Party for Germany: after all, why wouldn’t ordinary Germans vote to reject the catastrophic immigration policies that both Christian Democrats and Social Democrats have inflicted on them?
The wake-up call has finally arrived. The youth wing of the AfD has just released an AI-generated video of exactly the kind that Goebbels would have made in that medium if it had existed in the early stages of his glorious march towards the Final Solution. With the chant, “Wir Schieben Si Alle ab”, or, “We’ll deport you all”, as a backing track, it features uniformed, lantern-jawed Herrenvolk males and prancing, buxom, flaxen-haired Mädchen. Meanwhile, glowering and sullen dark-complexioned illegals are being escorted onto airliners and flown to the ghastly hellhole that they implicitly deserve.
Clearly, something dark and sinister is occurring in Germany today for such an utterly foul video to have been made. In three German states AfD recently won between 29 per cent and 38 per cent of the young vote. “We are the party of the youth,” Hans-Christoph Berndt, the AfD’s foremost candidate in Brandenburg, later declared on public television. “The future is on our side.”
Sorry, but we know that one, as in “Tomorrow Belongs to Me”, the rousing and evilly-brilliant Hitler-Youth chorus in the musical Cabaret, which was written with piercing insight by two Jews, who knew all about that kind of stuff. So, maybe it is finally time to get worried and act against the very fons of our problems. Quite clearly, lawyers’ law is no law, but a recipe for chaos on our streets and possibly even a spot of time-travel to the 1930s. Fine – but who has the power to close down Strasbourg, the poisoned apple in the Eden that is the EU? Only Strasbourg’s lawyers have.
There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza….
Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.
Big apes, but not small humans, come under protection of Spanish law