Homo Europaicus

Homo Europaicus By Keyser Söze(Keyser Söze) Keyser has read a few things recently that make something that had previously been something of a mystery to Keyser make sense, namely the motivation behind the "European project" of the European Union. At the same time, this revelation ... Keyser Söze's Lair: The Canary... - http://keysersozeslair.blogspot.com/

Keyser Söze's Lair: The Canary Just Died, So Watch Out!

Monday, December 8, 2008

Homo Europaicus

Keyser has read a few things recently that make something that had previously been something of a mystery to Keyser make sense, namely the motivation behind the "European project" of the European Union. At the same time, this revelation also put various phenomena in North America in a different light.

So, let's start with the title to this post. You thought that was Latin for "Euro fag," didn't you? Well, shame on you! No, it's a take on the old phrase "Homo Sovieticus," which was a buzzword for the new personality that was supposedly being created along with (and as a precondition for) the new socialist society that would arise in the Soviet Union. Whereas people had previously been conditioned to act selfishly under the pressures of "capitalist" society, the new Homo Sovieticus would be a selfless, caring individual who worked without thought of personal gain for the collective good. We all know how well that one worked out. Well, the Europeans have launched their own way project to create a new sort of person that is cut loose from previous realities to march forward into a glorious new future for mankind.

So, the great project begins in the ruins of Western Europe after the Second World War. Millions of people are dead, and cities across the continent are leveled, especially in Germany, where the Allied bombing campaign for democracy and freedom has left nary a city above the size of a village intact. What is the cause of all this destruction? In the immediate sense, the expansionist drive of Nazi Germany, though the anti-German could claim that the Germans had been responsible for all three of the previous major wars in Euope (1870, 1914, 1939). Yet, in each of those conflicts, the Germans started off waging war on the French, who themselves had built up their forces in expectation of a rematch with the Germans after the first two conflicts. In the meanwhile, the last one had resulted in Russian domination of Eastern Europe (including a quarter of Germany itself), so what to do in this situation?

The immediate reaction was to seek a reconciliation of Germany and France, which would shut down the apparent driving force behind the previous military competition, while at the same time providing a form of unity (aided by the US) against the Soviet threat. The new project started off harmlessly enough as a collaboration in coal marketing, which expanded into a much more encompassing Common Market, which finally took on full political significance with the attempt since the early '90s to give the collective group of member states, which by now spread over most of Western Europe, a sort of overarching government in the form of the European Union>, and then expand into Eastern Europe now that the USSR had imploded.

Sounds all noble and fuzzy, no? Well, no. This project implied from the start, and increasing implemented, a thorough-going denial of past historical identity, the self-conscious rejected of national traditions, and the concoction ex nihilo of a new identity "European" identity that that presupposes the suppression of what preceded and has to destroy all vestiges of contrary feeling.

The other day Keyser was reading an essay about (of all things!), Ernst Robert Curtius's History of Latin Literature in the Middle Ages. You're probably thinking to yourself, what the hell does that have to do with the topic? And it was Keyser's realization on this very point that has led to his new understanding of what the Europeans are up to. The essay was talking about what a great influence this book had on the new cohort of students in Germany at the time of its release in 1948. Supposedly, everyone was reading the thing and couldn't get enough. And why? Because the book was a reaction against the debacle caused by National Socialism, and what it argued was that there had previously been a common European culture that took the form of Latin learning in the middle ages. The author of the essay made out that Curtius was a traditional conservative (i.e.., not a Nazi), and was trying to find a way to justify "conservative" values in the face of the socialist challenge from the East, while at the same time rejecting the Nazi past. Now, it's worth noting (as most people don't) that National Socialism was in fact the first mass movement in Germany that was based not on confessional identity (Catholic vs. Protestant) or economic status (the socialists and communists, as well as the plethora of class-based parties from Second Reich and Weimar periods) or even the ancient noble/commoner distinctions (after all, the old princely states had only been overthrown in 1918) but on a common identity (Deutschtum or "Germannness"). It's interesting that the culminating speech in Leni Riefenstahl's famous cinematic paean to the Nazi takeover, Triumph of the Will, has Hitler addressing Germany's youth. He says not a word about anti-Semitism, but instead talks about how the common, classless future of all Germans belongs to the youth. Gives some sense of why Nazism was so popular in Germany (in these post-Holocaust days one tends to think of Nazism purely in terms of its anti-Semitic policies, and while that clearly was important and did have broad resonance with the general public, there was a lot more to the party's success than that). So, to get back to the Latin middle ages, Curtius argued - seemingly against historical reality - that the "real" spirit of Europe lay in those distant halcyon days when everyone shared a culture based on a shared language and a shared sense of common values (going back to the Classical heritage of Latin-speaking antiquity).

When Keyser read this essay a week or so ago, he thought that the creation of this European fantasy in the aftermath of Germany's collapse was interesting if somewhat odd. (Could one really imagine a general enthusiasm among college students of reading hundreds of pages about medieval Latin literature?) But it took on an entirely new meaning when read in the context of the discussion of the European Union that figures prominently in the last pages of the book The Ghost of Freedom just reviewed by Keyser. The gist can be summarized in the following quote:

As time went on, the emphasis shifted from making a new continent to rediscovering one. Building on the momentum of Franco-German reconciliation, a nucleus of committed states and leaders [NB] was soon engaged in a movement of radical return, embracing such "European values" as respect for individual rights, skepticism about the unrestrained market, preference for diplomacy over force, and an identity that might be called cosmopolitanism - national yet "multi-" and "trans-" as well. (246)

With this in mind,let's revisit the book on the Latin middle ages. There were several great advantages to using this fantasy as the basis of a new identity. The Latin-speaking period had died out centuries before, so who could readily say that it's a lot of nonsense? The number of people speaking and writing Latin in the middle ages were miniscule, and the notion of a common (literary) culture is nonsense. A medieval German was a medieval German, and a medieval Frenchman was a medieval Frenchman, with their own distinctive parochial culture however much they chose to express themselves in Latin (and naturally the vast majority of the population didn't). Now, it is true that notion of "German" or "Frenchman" held in the pre-modern period would not have been identical to the national identities created along with the modern nation states, but that's not relevant to the present issue. The point is that there was no common "European" identity that bridged or even superseded local identity.

The second benefit for the "literary" definition of European identity was that it was based not on current historical traditions (mostly national in original or content) but a set of artificially selected "values." Once one grants the supposed literary values of the distant past as something to emulate, then one is at liberty to "fill in the blank" and add to the list of present-day values that supposedly constitute this "European identity" anything that struck one's fancy.

Third, these common European values that would now be used to define the new identity would not be based on the parochial chauvanistic values of any given location. This will be important, as the corollary is that local values that stand in the way of the new ones have to be rejected, suppressed and supplanted.

The fourth advantage is that the old commonality was based on the educated segments of society, who were its bearers and interpreters. Oddly enough, this conception would give cultural (and political) power to an educated elite who alone understood the "true" values and could pass them along to the benighted masses.

If one sees the creation of the new identity as a "return" to a past that never existed, then a lot of seeming craziness takes on a sort of internal (at any rate) logic. These supposed European values are clearly not very representative of Europe's actual historical reality, since the use of violence to achieve national aims and the widespread suppression of individual rights in the name of various religious faiths and political ideologies are concepts far more representative of European traditions.

So the new project actually entails a "creative" and intentional form of falsehood and deception. To quote again from The Ghost of Freedom:

The [Second World W]ar, however, did more than destroy an old system. It also set up on the enduring themes in Europe's long march away from 1945, namely the conscious struggle to misremember the past. Trauma can produce three kinds of reactions. One is rugged determination, a courageous commitment to remake and rebuild. Another is nostalgia, a way of recalling the past that is selective and sepia-tinged. The third is creative amnesia, an effort to refashion the past so that it provides a coherent link to the imagined present. (247)

If one then thinks of the modern "European project" as an intentional effort to forget the actual reality of the past century and a half (or more!) of European history with the aim of returning to a fabulous past that never in fact existed in which an educated class of prominent individuals represented and reflected a set of normative common values that defined membership in a collective European "spirit," then certain consequences naturally flow from these (false) premises.

First, the national past of the old states must be denied legitimacy and ignored, and those who uphold the value of the nation state have to denigrated. You know, Keyser had a post some time ago with the video of an English song called "Roots" that decried the lack of historically rooted tradition in England. The song is specifically about the lack of a musical tradition, but Keyser was struck by the lyric, "I've lost St. George [the patron saint of England, whose flag was the old English flag], and the Union Jack [i.e., the national flag of the United Kingdom, which incorporated the flag of St. George along with the flags of Scotland and Ireland]. It's my flag too, and I want it back." This lyric expresses, Keyser thinks, a sense of regret among common people (rather than the sort that would have read Latin the middle ages or read a book about it in college) at the conscious effort to efface traditional national values. Remember the description above that the new European identity is "cosmopolitan"? Well, that is a positive way of expressing the negative suppression of national identity and the values that support it.

This explains a number of seemingly silly, but actually significant, events. For the 200th anniversay of the Battle of Trafalgar, in which a British fleet defeated a combined French and Spanish one, thereby thwarting an attempt to invade Britain:

Tuesday's re-enactment in the Solent will pit reds against blues, not British against French and Spanish.

The organisers said they were not attempting to re-create Trafalgar.

Second Sea Lord, Vice Admiral Sir James Burnell-Nugent, said the event was "a celebration of a battle at sea at the time of Nelson - not an exact mock-up of the British and French at Trafalgar".

The point was not (as Nelson's last descendant imagines in the story) the narrow desire to avoid offending the French and Spanish. Rather, it was a conscious refusal to permit a form of British identity based on previous national military (or other) success.

Just yesterday, we learned of a "cleansing" of traditional terms from a children's dictionary put out by Oxford:

Words associated with Christianity, the monarchy and British history have been dropped from a leading dictionary for children.

Oxford University Press has removed words like "aisle", "bishop", "chapel", "empire" and "monarch" from its Junior Dictionary and replaced them with words like "blog", "broadband" and "celebrity". Dozens of words related to the countryside have also been culled.

The publisher claims the changes have been made to reflect the fact that Britain is a modern, multicultural, multifaith society.

But academics and head teachers said that the changes to the 10,000 word Junior Dictionary could mean that children lose touch with Britain's heritage.

There's no "but" about the point of these changes being a bit of "collateral" damage in the effort to make the dictionary more "relevant." The selection of words is quite deliberate, and has consequences. The intended purpose once again is to undermine and devalue tradition in favor of "cosmopolitan" values.

Is it any wonder that Britain is now a place where they cancel the traditional Christmas play because some Muslim holiday gets in the way? The agenda of "multiculturalism" (which is just a Trojan horse term for "cosmopolitanism") is just a way to seize the supposed moral ground in the form of ostensible tolerance, while in fact using it as an excuse to attack traditional values (in this instance Christianity; reader's know the value that the godless but traditionalist Keyser sets on Christmas plays). Any wonder why the guy in the song feels that he's "lost St. George"? (One might note that a similar devaluation in the past has gone in the US, where history now consists of nothing but the sordid tales of slavery and the dispossession of the noble, and undifferentiated, "Native Americans," but that's a topic for a different post.)

It could be that the European elites will succeed in their endeavor of supplanting old traditions with their own vision of a soulless multi-national state that interferes in daily life and is basically undemocratic. Ever wonder why the Europeans won't submit their constitutional reforms (the Treaty of Lisbon) to popular vote, especially after the French derailed the old attempt by voting it down? Now you know. It's because the elites have created a vision that runs counter to and necessitates the suppression of the national identities that the average idiot still clings to. And naturally, the elites in charge of the great project have never overtly made their aims clear and obfuscate the situation by using words like "multiculturalism" and "tolerance" that don't actually mean what they seem to.

Oh, and of course the new image not only is based on the imagined past, but needs a contemporary "other" (as the leftists academics would put it), and that opposite that they're not like is the US. When the Germans had a collective orgasm at the suitably phallic Siegessäule in Berlin at the thought of Barry Obama, the dark child of the Democratic machine of the South Side of Chicago, it was not because they knew a damned thing about the man himself. No, it's what he stood for. Apparently, an American who wasn't "really" an American, but a leftist supposedly holding the same values as the Europeans do, which includes a sneering contempt for the sort of unbridled capitalism that distinguishes the US from Europe (despite the fact that it was not lack of regulation but, quite the contrary, misguided, politically motivated economic directives from Washington that caused the subprime disaster). Now that BHO has reappointed the Clinton administration, the Europeans (along with the inmates of the Daily Koz) may find out that the delusions they foisted onto Barry may not be prove to be a valid indication of reality.

And Keyser wonders if ultimately this conflict between hopes and reality may not also sink the great "European project." Keyser remembers reading years ago about an abortive attempt to unify Senegal and the Gambia, two small states in West Africa. The Gambia gets its definite article from the fact the country was a creation of the British, who held a slaving station at the head of the river and basically took control of the up waters, while the French wound up with all the surrounding territory. The upshot is that the Gambia is several hundred miles long but only a few miles wide, and the same "peoples" inhabit both countries. So you'd think that the rational thing to do in the post-colonial period would be to merge these ethnically overlapping territories created by the Europeans. But no. The reason given for the failure of the proposal to do so was that the administrative "culture" of the two countries were too different. And where did these cultures comes from? Several decades of rule by Europeans made the locals feel that their "traditions" were too distinct for cooperation. This anecdote has always come to Keyser's mind when he ponders the European effort to form a continental government. He was of the opinion that if a few decades of colonial rule could the Gambian Mandinkos into surrogate Brits and the Senegalese Mandinkos into Frenchmen, then what of the real English and French? Could centuries of divergent traditional be suppressed and supplanted?

Maybe so. After all, after the collapse of the multinational projects known as Jugoslavia and the Soviet Union, there were some people leftover who thought of themselves as Jugoslavs or Soviet citizens rather than Slovenes or Bosnians or Tatars or whatever. But they were a distinct and small minority, the detritus from the failed attempt to build a new identity in place of historically rooted ones. It took 70 years for both of those communist states to break apart. One wonders how long the EU will last.

Oh, and on second thought, it turns out that you were right about what "Homo Europaicus" means.