He didn't get the office in Rome, but then he didn't exactly do seven days a week in Brussels, either. When I suggested to a couple of Italian journalists that they ought to tail him to see just how many hours a week he actually put in here in Brussels, they were horrified at the suggestion anyone should breach his privacy in that way. That was the point at which I remembered Italian journalists are licensed by the Italian state -- you have to pass an exam set by the bureaucrats of that famously corrupt country and win your dog tag, or you can't work as a reporter. I blush for the lot of them. Still, that was a few years ago. Now Frattini is in Silvio Berlusconi's government as foreign minister and is about to go to a summit with his counterpart in Paris. So he has given an interview today in Le Figaro . I'll give you some of Open Europe's translation. One question was, 'What must be done to reinforce the common European identity?' (Yes, I know, it is a tripe question, but I'll deal with the fiction of a common European identity another time.) Frattini answered that what needs to be done is build a European army 'in order to increase its [the EU's] capacity for intervention on the international scene. The creation of a Franco-Italian alpine brigade, which will be announced in Paris, represents a first step.' Perfect. As any possible 'capacity for intervention on the international scene' now demands fighting in Near Eastern and Asian deserts, the EU is getting ready with Italian and French soldiers kitted out with crampons and thermal underwear. Unless Brussels is planning on invading Switzerland -- and, oh, how they'd love to -- the idea of a Franco-Italian alpine brigade sowing the seeds of an EU army is ludicrous. And, note to Brussels: even the Wehrmacht knew it couldn't successfully take Switzerland in 1939-45, so maybe keep 'la brigade alpine franco-italienne' war games well away from the Swiss borders. Frenchmen and Italians are so much better suited to nightclubs than real fighting, anyway. As part of the EU's €2.4bn a year propaganda budget -- that is about £2bn a year, all of it out of taxpayers' money -- the European Commission has colonised a part of YouTube and renamed it.... EU Tube. Now you can go online to watch hours of video footage of eurocrats telling you how important their work is and how much good they are all doing you. Thing is, the eurocrats are so convinced they are all doing splendid work, that DG Communications -- which is the fountainhead of all this euro-propaganda -- has even had a slick film made about itself, called One Day at DG Communications. (In the euro-jargon, DG means directorate-general.) They think they are showing themselves as brilliant and hardworking. In fact, they are showing themselves to be what they are: ideologically-driven and sinister. Then there is this one, called Our Europe, Our Union, showing us all how almost everything good we have -- right down to 'equal rights and justice' and 'abolition of the death penalty' -- is down to membership of the EU. Yes, as far as the European Commission is concerned, everything from Magna Carta to the 1689 Bill of Rights to parliamentary democracy is an irrelevance in securing the rights of HM's subjects. It's all really down to the EU...click on these video windows and you will see the films by way of YouTube. But click on the blue links if you want to see the EU Tube page in its full, highly-expensive, self-aggrandising glory. But Sky Italia is the only serious TV rival to Berlusconi's Mediaset media empire. Italian television is pretty much sewn-up between Mediaset and the State-owned RAI, which is itself controlled by Berlusconi's government. So, according to the Financial Times, the communications minister is reported to have let Brussels know that any such decision will simply be ignored by the Italian government. Berlusconi's motives might be questionable, but his attitude to interfering eurocrats is flawless. Arrive back at Brussels airport any time, and one thing is certain: there will be at least one suitcase on the baggage carousel with a sticker announcing, 'Mon pays, l'Europe.' My country is Europe. Yes, in Brussels you need to keep your in-flight sick-bag handy even in the arrivals hall. More, the European Commission have been giving this 'citizen of Europe' propaganda a particular push in the last few days. They have announced they now want to trigger the clause in the Lisbon Treaty which will allow signatures from a million 'EU citizens' to oblige the commission to consider some proposal or other as EU legislation. Now, of course, the commissioner in charge of this new piece of mass propaganda --- Maros Sefcovic, a Slovak socialist and no, you've never heard of him -- has been saying that this will be 'a real step forward in the democratic life of Europe.' It will be no such thing. It is merely part of the relentless EU efforts to dissolve the links between each citizen of each sovereign state and his true democratic voice, which is his national parliament. You already know it, but here it is again: democracy is rule of the state by the 'demos,' the people of the nation. Hundreds of millions of people of 27 different nationalities who happen to live on part of the vast geographical lump called Europe do not make up a 'demos.' A million signatures from an arbitrary selection of 27 countries are just a skull-count, not the voice of a nation. If a citizen of Finland or Portugal or any other country wants a change in the laws under which he must live, the only democratic way he can do this is through his national parliament. Asking a supranational, undemocratic body such as the European Commission to impose a new law on the citizens of sovereign states has nothing to do with legitimate government. But as I say, it is all part of this relentless drive to destroy the relationship between the citizen of a nation and the parliament of his nation. This is where we get to the EU's regional policy, which has been back in the news lately with the disclosure that the Government is supporting plans by eurocrats to erase the name 'English Channel' from the maps used in schools and by bureaucrats. It is part of long-standing EU plans to break up the British Isles into European regions, taking the fragments of what was once Britain and turning them into segments of eurocrat-invented regions that are tied to the Continent. Above is an example. It is map of the new euro-region to be known as the Arc Manche. This policy will wipe out national borders and replace them with 'regions' which will have direct ties to (and payments from) the EU institutions -- bypassing the national parliaments. Since the 'Mon pays, l'Europe' propagandists fear that the fact of an 'English Channel' will be too strong a reminder of the historic independence of Britain from the Continent, its name will be reduced to the French version of 'the Anglo-French pond.' The idea is that it will be reduced in importance to 'a shared space, a small Anglo-French internal sea.' Tell that to Dame Vera Lynn. Meanwhile, Scotland will break away into a region with links to parts of Norway (which isn't even in the EU), Iceland (ditto), and Finland. The west of Britain will be tied to, among other Catholic Continental countries, Spain. Yes, thanks to Brussels it looks like the Spanish Armada is going to make it in the end. Once he lands at Jakarta, capital of the world's largest Muslim state, he probably won't make the same mistake he made a few years ago in Kenya, when he let himself be photographed wearing a turban. Still, he may find it hard to resist the urge to go native. One of the reasons a lot of Americans find Obama oddly foreign is that he had an oddly foreign childhood: his formative years were spent in Indonesia. His half-sister, Maya Soetoro Ng, was born there. The rest of Obama's childhood was spent in Honolulu, a Pacific Ocean capital soaked in East Asian culture. What's this got to do with Britain, or indeed with Europe? Plenty. Obama is the first US president who was raised without cultural or emotional or intellectual ties to either Britain or Europe. The British and the Europeans have been so enchanted with 'America's first black president' that they haven't been able to see what he really is: America's first Third World president. If you doubt it, remember the kick in the teeth he gave Britain over the Falklands just a few weeks ago. Obama had his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, fly to Buenos Aires to give American support to President Kirchner's call for international negotiations over the Falklands. Amazing. What was more amazing is that all we've heard out of Number 10 and the Foreign Office since then is that it doesn't mean anything. Oh, yes it does, and Washington insiders know it does. I've just been in touch with Dr James Lucier, a former US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Staff Director, about all this. He tells me: 'Culturally, Obama detests Great Britain. He sent the bust of Churchill back without a fig leaf of an excuse. He insulted the Queen and the Prime Minister, giving them ridiculous gifts.' At one point, 'he refused to meet the prime minister.' Here is what is happening, though the British Government seems oblivious of it. The Obama administration is ready to dump the Old World in pursuit of the One World. Britain is being dumped. The special relationship, whatever is left of it, is over. Britain losing control of the Falklands to Argentina would just be collateral damage. But France is being dumped, too. Obama's ostentatious refusal to have dinner with President Sarkozy during his visit to France last year was no accident. Rather than meet the French president, Obama went off to a restaurant with his wife Michelle. Germany is being dumped. Obama has been little more than dismissive of Chancellor Merkel. Russia in turn will be waved aside. Most spectacularly of all, the European Union has now been comprehensively dumped. The American president has refused to attend what is supposed to be a US-EU Madrid summit in May. What we have shaping up, but what the British Government doesn't yet grasp, is that Obama has a conscious policy of down-grading America's relationship with, first, Britain and then with the rest of Europe. He believes that the US -- yes, his own country -- and Britain, and the leading European countries, too, for that matter, are imperial powers who ruthlessly exploited the Third World for their own profit. And Obama is America's first Third World president. Forget Obama's Chicago black cadence. It is a fake. He copied from the kind of black preachers that were unknown to him until he was a grown man and inventing his political image. What the Obama administration has near-wiped from the president's personal history is that his only childhood links with America were as a schoolboy in a fashionable private school in Asia-dominated Hawaii, where he was raised by his white, bank executive grandmother. Chicago is not Obama's homeland. It never was his formative influence. The president's world view is more aligned with that of Indonesia. You can be sure the gift Obama gives the President of Indonesia will be something more than the dvd box-set of old Hollywood movies he gave to Gordon Brown. The US president's manner on the trip to Indonesia will be more the manner he showed to the King of Saudi Arabia last year. The king received a deep bow, something never done by any US president before. Obama also kow-towed to the Emperor of Japan and to the Chinese premier. What's going on? According to Dr Lucier, Obama's policy is to disestablish the United States, Great Britain and Europe from the hegemony of world power, and elevate in their place the hegemony of the Third World under international governance. Remember, Obama is a deracinated individual. He has no roots. He is a man from an Asian-Pacific background bred to no admiration for the ancient constitutional history which, until now, has reached across the Atlantic to bind America and Britain. The president actually feels that the US Constitution, which grew out of Magna Carta and the 1689 Bill of Rights, is 'inadequate.' Indeed, Obama has stated that, because the US Constitution guarantees only 'negative rights' -- that is, establishes what the US Government may not do to individuals or to the sovereign states -- instead of giving people guarantees of food, shelter education and health care and the rest, it is 'inadequate.' That is one reason he has worked so hard to get the health care legislation through Congress. It is undoubtedly unconstitutional. Already, the attorneys-general of Florida and South Carolina are poised to challenge its constitutionality in court. At least another dozen state attorneys-general may join in the suit. Obama has made it clear he despises both the US Constitution and the British tradition from which it springs. His decision to send his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, to Argentina to give support to President Kirchner is part of this anti-British atttitude. Mrs Clinton has supported President Kirchner's demands that the fate of the Falklands be decided by the United Nations decolonisation committee. It is all part of the same Obama world-view. This interference in South American affairs is not part of the old yankee -- yanqui -- imperialism. The important thing to note is that the Obama administration is not stepping in to decide the fate of the Falklands itself. No, it wants to turn the dispute over to a Third World-dominated instrument of international governance, the UN. One might imagine that Obama is willing to back Argentina over the Falklands because he thinks America has something to gain from it. That is not the reason. There is no profit for the US in cultivating the Latino presidents, and there is no particular policy to do so. Rather, US support for Kirchner's demand that the Falklands question be turned over to the UN is just another opportunity for Obama to strengthen the ideological world system which he hopes will one day overwhelm the old Anglo-Saxon Common Law America. His vision is for the US to abandon its Constitution and its laws, which are tied to Britain, the country for which he has shown such disdain.
The EU is battle-ready: crampons, thermals and gettin' down
08 April 2010 11:29 AM
The £2bn propaganda eurocrats colonise YouTube
07 April 2010 12:04 PM
Reasons to love the Italians, part 87
06 April 2010 9:50 AM
'Mon pays, l'Europe.' Not likely, mate.
22 March 2010 3:48 PM
Barack Hussein Obama and Indonesia: there's no place like home
Sunday, 11 April 2010
This smooth chap is Franco Frattini, now the Italian foreign minister, but from 2004 to 2008 he was the European Commissioner for Justice. About the only thing he did in Brussels that sticks in my mind was that he allegedly tried to get the Italian government to let him run his commission office mostly from Rome. According to my Italian contacts, he wanted the job but couldn't face living in Brussels -- something to do with the quality of the nightclubs.
The European Commission has told Silvio Berlusconi's communications minister that it may rule that Sky Italia, the pay-TV broadcaster, must finally be permitted to bid for new Italian digital terrestrial frequencies.
Now that President Obama has done enough back-room deals to get the Democrats' health care legislation through the House of Representatives, he can resume making plans for a visit to his childhood home, Indonesia. The trip was on for this week, but the White House cancelled it so Obama could stay in Washington to push through the Bill.
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