My European Union Rant

David Seaton's News Links

Now it is the European Union itself that is in danger, mainly but not entirely because of the economic crisis inherited from Wall Street abuses. (...) A new Europe-wide report by correspondents of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro reveals mounting disillusionment with the European Union itself among the voters of its member states. (...) Britain has made the most news about possible withdrawal from the union since the country’s most recent local elections gave the United Kingdom Independence Party nearly as high a popular vote as the ruling Conservative Party, led by Prime Minister David Cameron. (...) There was an immediate rise in demand among Conservative Party members for a referendum on quitting the EU – which the Ukip promises. William Pfaff

The British are talking about leaving the European Union... to put this conversation in perspective, I would trot out the famous quote of Mahatma Gandhi's, who, when asked what he thought of western civilization replied, "It would be a good idea".

If we agree that the heartland of western civilization is comprised of the countries, including Britain, that make up the European Union and we then consider the millions of Europeans that have been killed (by each other) over centuries in Europe's countless wars, religious and otherwise, and its assorted genocides and the millions of its inhabitants that were forced to emigrate to the ends of the earth to escape poverty and tyranny, and then contemplate its record outside Europe of: slavery, exploitation of natural resources, ethnic cleansings and genocides of peoples of color and then consider that so recently having renounced killing one another and so recently, if reluctantly, also laid down the white man's burden, then it might be a tad early and a trifle frivolous to quibble about an institution which might loosely fit Gandhi's description of a "good idea", namely the European Union?

Really all this talk makes me think of a chain smoker, who having been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer and that after having had a lung removed and undergoing intense radiation and ghastly chemotherapy, upon being told that he is in remission goes out and buys a pack of cigarettes. DS