“Don’t give up,” the fight against Brexit was the message recently expressed by outgoing EU President Donald Tusk. Tusk cannot abide the idea of anyone resisting his vision of a united Europe projecting its bureaucratic nightmare on the rest of the world.
Brexit is an affront to his very nature because it represents the free choice of people to say no to him. Tusk, like many at the top of the EU hierarchy, are ideologues. At best they were shaped by a false sense of danger about the future of Europe and the world.
At worst, they are simply power mad opportunists giving voice to their inherent desire to dominate others.
And so, his exhortation to Remainers in the UK to keep fighting to stop Brexit is yet another sad attempt, like King Canute, to hold back the tide of populism that is sweeping across Europe. And it is odious, careerist ideologues like Tusk who have accelerated this pushback by populations all over Europe against his idea of a European super state.
Because every time he opens his mouth, he betrays his disdain for those that don’t share his vision. He openly admitted to working against the will of a majority of Brits who voted to leave his club. No one in British or European media even commented on the brazen interference of these remarks on the outcome of the election campaign underway in the UK
As Brendan O’Neill of Spiked News in the UK points out, the hypocrisy over foreign meddling in the election is off the charts.
This is really a tale of two Donalds. When Donald Trump poked his fake-tanned nose into Britain’s electoral affairs a couple of weeks ago, by proposing an alliance between Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, the chattering classes went crazy. ‘How dare he’, they hollered. Yet when Donald Tusk sticks his beak into our politics, they lap it up. They get emotional, even, shedding a tragic tear or two over the fact that this bloke no one in the UK ever voted for will never again get to boss Britain around once he leaves the EC. How will we cope when this decent bureaucrat, a man just like us, a man so unlike the thick throng who voted for Brexit, moves on?
No depth of mendacity is unplumbed by those in favor of European integration. Because they know that, ultimately, “when things get serious you have to lie,” as Tusk’s mate and also soon-to-be-pastured Jean-Claude Juncker famously said.
The sheer desperation evident in Tusk’s remarks can be summed up in his insistence that the only way for Britain to regain its former glory is as a hind teat within the EU, mercilessly milked for taxes and sapped of investment within their Kafkaesque plutocracy.
I wonder, Don, but how will the UK become anymore of a ‘second-rate player’ than it is under the EU? For decades Britain’s growth has fallen to fall in line with that of an EU on the verge of financial collapse.
The only way the UK fails to thrive in a post-Brexit world is if the EU decides to punish it for its recalcitrance. There’s no compelling reason to put up tariffs or barriers to trade. The default position is that they will return because that’s what men like Donald Tusk want to do to project power and primacy.
Tusk betrays both his historical and economic ignorance in appealing, cynically, to that lost glory of the British Empire, the last vestiges of which, domestically, are tied deeply to the EU. He’s right that politically the current political establishment in the UK is wholly committed to the EU’s empire as a means by which to extend the remnants of the old one further into the 21st century than it could (or should) otherwise.
So, in that sense Tusk let the mask slip a little further.
But he’s wrong in appealing to Brits like this. It’s frankly demeaning and condescending to older Brexit voters who understand that they aren’t the problem with the UK, he is. And even if they are the problem, it is their right to choose how to fix things not accept solutions from some officious oaf who is so unloved back home in Poland he can’t even run for public office.
And maybe the people who chose Brexit reject the Imperial Dream for what it is, a nightmare that costs far more in the end than it achieves.
The EU is building a technocratic, unelected Imperial Europe built on a model of governance, frankly, worse than that of the old Soviet Politburo. At least in the USSR there wasn’t any pretense of democracy or choice.
The EU has a parliament with no legislative authority and whose masters are chosen in backroom deals far more controlled than any domestic party congress. At least Boris Johnson had to publicly campaign among his own party to replace Theresa May and now is standing for confirmation of his position across the whole of the UK
Not that I’m a huge fan of elections per se since democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others, but I have to ask when was Donald Tusk elected to the position, he still commands for the next two weeks?
Which brings me to another terrible thing Mr. Juncker is famous for saying, that there can be no democratic choice against the European treaties.
The EU is supreme over its member states. Not sovereign, superior. In the same way the US Federal Government is supreme, yet not sovereign, over the States.
And it is this loss of sovereignty that is now being challenged by deplorable people all over Europe for doing exactly what Mr. Juncker told them they couldn’t do, choose against them and their silly pieces of paper.
Pieces of paper, mind you, that are supposed to assist in keeping society civil not subservient. It’s fascinating watching Donald Tusk get the vapors over the threat of a post-Soviet Russia saying they are a strategic problem not a strategic partner while the EU becomes more anti-democratic by the day and Vladimir Putin in Russia presides over a Russian Federation which is slowly devolving power out of Moscow and handing it back to the regions through investment and respect for local differences.
Did I ever hear Tusk stand up for Polish sovereignty in the face of Angela Merkel’s attacks on his home country for how it selects its supreme court? Did Tusk argue against Article 7 proceedings against Poland?
No. He didn’t.
The simple truth is that Tusk’s tenure has been marked by one failure after another. He couldn’t stop Nordstream 2 (not that he should have), Brexit, Russia’s return to the Council of Europe or the rise of populists all across the continent.
On his watch he helped destroy relations with Russia, increasing the likelihood of conflict, rather than improve them. It’s fair to say that everything bad about the EU is personified in Mr. Tusk.
A second-rate politician, unelectable at home, running a second-rate would-be empire.