Last weekend, on nearly opposite sides of the EU, two states revealed how the cumbrous juggernaut of the union is not working. No, sorry, cannot be made to work. There are too many conflicting interests, too many cultural differences, and too many limbs on this beast, with not enough synchronised governance to make it work. What unites Hungary in the East with Ireland on the West? Not language, not habit, not race, not indigenous law, but Christianity: And what did the EU deny as even a defining factor, never mind easily the most important one, of the European peoples? Yes, Christianity.
What has that to do with the fuel protests in Ireland, which have nearly brought the Irish government to its knees? One word: Reality. Reality is where the coast of Eurasia nearly meets the shores of Arabia. Reality is the worldwide need for hydrocarbons. Reality is that science has not yet been able to devise a replacement energy for fossil fuels. Reality is the psychopathic anti-Semitism that governs much of the Arab world. Reality is the anti-Arab racism of the Israeli settler-movement. Reality is President Trump’s loud voice, his empty bombast, his uncontrolled ego and his very large finger on an extremely small map. Reality is protesters with huge lorries and combine-harvesters forcing concessions from a spineless Irish government. Reality is the powerlessness of that government, which must now seek permission from the European Commission to cut excise duties and abandon increases to the utterly insane, EU-ordained carbon tax.
But that final reality is a wholly volitional one. The EU has leapt ahead of what is technologically possible with its plans to decarbonise Europe’s economy. This is ideology talking, often through the mouths of zealously ignorant journalists, not science. At the most basic level, few of the windmills that now desecrate Europe’s coastlines, flatlands and hilltops will retrieve the CO2 that went into their making. These are the secular cathedrals of the EU, and their primary purpose is to psychologically assure the peoples of Europe how unimportant they are in contrast to the green and lofty ambitions of the EU directorate.
That directorate does not want its secular cathedrals to be dwarfed by the remembered power emanating from the ancestral buildings that previously defined the continent’s civilisations. How can any group of peoples agree on what they have in common if their rulers veto any mention of their true unifying characteristic, namely a belief in Christianity and the moral ethos we inherited from the Jewish people? The precepts of governance as devised by the Greeks are largely structural; they speak to how people respond to their rulers, and how the latter should exercise power. But the moral authority, which inhabits our souls and infuses our consciences and the interpersonal relationships, was devised within a few hundred square miles around the sea of Galilee, along the Jordan river and across Sinai’s sands. Deny the Holy Land its place in who we are, then all that remains are the bland prescriptions of politicians and secular lawyers whose reach for wisdom does come close to the fonts that tell us what we are.
I know little enough about Hungary, and my opinions on Orbán are to a degree shaped by those who detest him, whose execrations incline me to like him. His is a Hungarian patriot, and not a plastic Europhile. The news site Huffington Post described hm as a “pro-Russia, right-wing nationalist” which is better still, for the Post is a sewer that bubbles with the kind of effluent that you’d expect. That it approvingly quotes the British politicians Keir Starmer and Ed Davey as sources of moral authority is both amusing and insightful: Who?
These creatures are no more than footsteps in the sands of history, to be blown away by amnesia’s softest breeze. Alas, the same cannot be said of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen who declared: “Hungary has chosen Europe. Europe has always chosen Hungary. A country reclaims its European path. The Union grows stronger.”
Piffle, to be sure, but powerful piffle, from a powerful woman who has specialised in ambitious, energetic incompetence throughout her career. When Irish government ministers look at Brussels, they see themselves reflected in her ineptitude, though seldom as urbane and well-coiffed as she is. Where does she get such unmerited self-confidence, like an untrained Bonaparte who never left Ajaccio? She has become a physical template for Europe’s female politicians: Highlighted hair, besuited, oozing authority, while sporting razor-sharp, bespoke cheekbones as if acquired from an ossuary-supermarket.
Whereas the fuel protesters in Ireland last week seem to come from different species of mammal. To compensate for their apparent lack of cheekbones, they were each festooned with several chins, like heaped baby dugongs. What they lacked in beauty, they made up with guile, No sooner had they forced the Dublin government to back down and give them more money, than they moved their blockading vehicles – most of which owe their very existence to government subsidies and grants – to resume their protests elsewhere, and of course demanding yet more money. For once you have paid the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane…
Hormuz is not the only choke-point where pressure hurts: What works where Arabia nearly touches Eurasia also works in Ireland, where ports and motorways are places of pain for unprotesting motorists and increasingly, for Ireland’s powerless figurehead-politicians. The latter pretend to have the answers to Ireland’s problems. They do not. However, the empty-headed, shiny-toothed rhetorician of Brussels certainly has, even though she merely offers the stock and meaningless EU clichés that have made the EU the laughing stock of the world’s major powers: The US, China, Russia and the clustered keffiyehs of Arabia.
But let’s look on the bright side. The US Navy has very kindly agreed to take over the blockade of the Straits of Hormuz from the strangely-depleted Iranian Navy. Isn’t it reassuring to see two former enemies co-operating to produce the same outcome? A worldwide shortage of energy, rising fuel prices, and inflation-destroying savings and pension funds. Most of these calamities are the product of Trump breaking his promises not to do the very things that he has just been doing. There are no Iranian nuclear bombs ready for detonation, and no missiles which can deliver them anywhere. Moreover, US satellites and U-2S spy-planes could detect any movement of suspect materials from known nuclear depots.
These are indeed difficult times, which is perhaps why three Americans and a Canadian – including a woman and a black man – recently tried to escape the surly bonds of Earth and our modern horrors. All things considered, they did okay, managing to get some 250,000 miles away before they reached the end of their rubber band, which promptly snapped them back to earth. Last we heard, they were bound for the Strait of Hormuz as a punishment.
Meanwhile, from the western shores of Ireland to the eastern marches that lie beyond the Danube, the EU sinks into a self-centred mire of inconsequentiality. The peoples that made the modern world have, with their incontinent welfare states and their reproductive continence, wished themselves into gradual extinction, as a death-cry, but in strangely Germanic tones, echoes hollowly over the EU’s unsentried ramparts: “The Union grows stronger.”
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.
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