Time was, in this country, and around the world, when
idealists used to dream of an End to All Wars -- to be enforced (a necessary
codicil, though not spoken so loud) by a One World Government. Americans were among those in the
forefront of this, signally Woodrow Wilson, who garnered a Nobel Peace Prize
for his advocacy of the League of Nations (la SDN), the first step towards such a new
order, established as the dust was settling from the
Great War. But when push
came to shove, Senate Republicans and prairie populists would have none of it, and Wilson’s
brainchild was a prophecy unhonored in its own country.
The ethos of that time
is now impossible to re-experience, though students of history may
imagine it. The Release 2.0
of the League, the United Nations, is mostly a debating shop, for harangues
that few heed. Not a bad
thing; good that it’s there; but no shadow or echo of the original
vision of One World Government (whose aftershadow lives on only in the nightmare
imagination of the prairie
populists).
~
Europe, however, shaken to its foundations by the deeper
trauma of the Second World War, which no-one ever imagined to dub “the Great”,
and which turned out even worse than our fears, adopted a more regional version
of the original vision, one which actually has some teeth to it: what is now known as the European
Union. The average American
has probably not even heard of the thing (indeed, I almost wrote “EEC” by
anachronism), but it is very real.
And its existence has no doubt contributed to the one big spectacular
fact of the past nigh-on seventy years, what must astonish any student of
European history (which has been bloodier at every level, than the non-devotee
has any idea): unbroken peace
among nations belonging to that Union.
An astonishment that grows with each passing year of No World War Three. And if there have, in the course of
those decades, been occasional instances of fussy Brusselian bureaucratic
overreach -- in one actual, notorious case, regulation of the length and curvature of
bananas -- this pales beside the Holocaust (to take one example, hm, at
random).
In time though, the freely adopted multiheaded yoke has come increasingly to chafe certain
individual withers; and resistance
to further EU encroachment has become a key issue in the upcoming pan-European
elections:
In part, this swell of opposition comes as a result of
actual EU overreach, such as the dismanteling of borders at a time of a great
“inwash of the unwashed” (see essays here and here), in part
because, from a more zeitgeistlich perspective, the diktats of Brussels have
encouraged fresh overreach by, for example, the misandrists of Paris and Stockholm,
who mean (and here I write hyperbolically, though only barely) to police and limit
(with a ruler, of the sort once used by nuns to smack the palms of naughty
boys) the length and curvature of erections.
[Update Memorial Day 2014; from the NZZ:
Europa und die EU, das sind
Klischees über Normen aller Art, etwa diejenige über die Krümmung der Gurke, die zwar längst nicht mehr gilt, aber an
Stammtischen unvermindert als Beispiel einer fehlgeleiteten monströsen
Bürokratie angeführt wird.
OK, so maybe it was cucumbers, not bananas. Same idea.
 |
| Gurke mit Attitude |
Anyhow, the people have spoken, in the Européennes, “un séisme europhobe”, avec percée du FN.]
~
~ Recommendation posthume ~
“Si j’étais encore en vie, et
que je désirais un bon whodunnit,
que lirais-je?"
(Je suis le Président Wilson, et
j’ai approuvé ce message)
~
Anyhow, all that is but by way of dilettante kibitzing; I am not among those solons such as
Thomas Friedman or George Will who
are licensed to pontificate each
Sunday, across from the editorial page. I do, however, carry an official Linguist’s License,
and am a paid-up member of the Global Sociophilological Association (QG: Genève -- it is actually a subunit of
the WDJ). And hence am
permitted to observe this new coinage, reported in this morning’s press:
L'écolo Durand s’en prend aux "Euro-tartuffes"
"Plus forts que les euro-sceptiques ou les euro-béats, voici venu le temps des euro-tartuffes", écrit-il. Soit, à
en croire Durand, ceux qui tiennent un discours à Paris et un autre à Bruxelles.
Which, being Englished for the convenience of our
obligate-anglophone friends, is no more than to say: A prominent Green politician has coined a category to join
the extant extremes of the Euro-sceptics
(those who oppose further EU encroachment), and the euro-béats (difficult to translate exactly: it refers to those bobo-bisounours,
who embrace the Union and all its present and potential works, with a great big
smoochy kiss): the opportunist Euro-hypocrites (after Molière’s
character Tartuffe), who, speaking alternately out of either side of the mouth spout one thing in Brussels and another thing at home: here to butter-up the goose, there to flatter the gander.
[
Updated here/ Mise à jour ici / Hier auf den neuesten Stand
gebracht:]
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