In response to some lively comments on our post God and scientific enquiry (December 12, 2011), we contribute the following for our readers’ entertainment.

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Contrary to common belief, the Hebrews were not the only people in the ancient world to postulate  the existence of one and only one god. They may have been the first, but there were others, some known to us among the Greeks, who believed (philosophically, while usually remaining in practice faithful to the many gods of their culture) in a singular divinity – or a divine singularity. They reasoned their way to it thus:

Of every sort of thing there is the appearance of it in our base world, and the essence of it in a higher immaterial world. The higher world is the true reality. So our world is a kind of illusion. Most people observe it without knowing that what they see is the mere shadow of the higher reality.

Though there may be many samples of anything you care to name  in our world, there can only be one essence of it. For example, there’s an essence of trees – treeness. There’s an essence of hamburgers – hamburgerness. And there’s an essence of abstract things, such as love. Many may love in many different ways, but there is an essence of love – loveness. Or to put it another way, since loveness is the reality and examples of it in the world only the appearance of it, that essence is Love Itself.

Now take existence. Many things exist. But the essence of existence is Existence Itself.

So how did many manifestations of existence come out of Existence Itself?

Existence Itself is unchangeable. Unmoving and unmoved. Yet something happened that brought about our world of appearances.

What happened was a process that went like this: Existence had a thought. So then there was another aspect of existence, Thought,  which was still part of the Essential Existence. And Thought extended itself with Reason, or Word. So then there was a third aspect of existence which was also still part of the Essential Existence. The three together were – are eternally, the philosophers held  – the Godhead.

So there we have the first Trinity. The Source – or Depth, as it was sometimes called (there were many other names for it, and for its first emanations) – and Thought and Reason: Bythos, Nous, Logos.

As they were hypostasized, that is personified as beings, Being in its fullness consisted of three Beings.

The pair of emanated beings or hypostases, Nous and Logos, begat (not “emanated”) other pairs of beings, which in turn begat other pairs – a pair being called by the enchanting word syzygy – in a long line of descent. In some schema they are male and female. Among the low descendants was an immortal demiurge, or artisan, and he it was who created this material world of ours. 

Logical flaws in these ideas have been pointed out by many generations of philosophers. But they had their effect not only on almost all subsequent philosophy – they have to be dealt with even if only to be dismissed – but also on religion, including Christianity (as we’ll explain in a later essay).

This idea of a Godhead is purely philosophical. There is nothing scientific about it. If you believe that the stone you stubbed your toe on is unreal, and the pain you feel is unreal, and only the essence (or “ideal”) of toe and stone and pain is “real”, science can do nothing about it except mark that you say you believe it.

Jillian Becker   December 14, 2011

Here are a couple of picks from an article  in Canada Free Press, by Dr. Karl L.E. Kaiser, on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change recently held in Durban, South Africa. We’re glad to say it fizzled out with no result to please the delegates other than an agreement to meet and try again to scare the world into enriching the UN.

First, here are some figures to startle and amuse. The first column of figures may be overlooked; not only because they’re uncertain, but the heading is nonsense – not every country, certainly not every little island, has a “federal government”. The second and third columns taken together have the flavor.

Table 1. Official pre-registrants at the Durban conference (COP17).

*) Data from unfccc.int; some registrants’ government affiliations are uncertain.

Clearly there are groups which were represented at extraordinarily high levels on a per capita basis. Without fail, they are the ones who feel that much (or any) of the “green” dollars to be funded (by other countries on this table) are owed to them. To underline the need and claim, the myths about “drowning in a rising sea” are perpetuated. Unfortunately, for them, the facts are somewhat different. Rather than becoming de-populated as we are told, and just prior to the last ocean wave sloshing over the remaining few square miles of land, their populations are doing the opposite. They are expanding in size and “happily living thereafter”. All of the ocean island nations claiming to be inundated by rising seas have had growing populations in recent years, without exception. If you really want to see what is happening, just look, for example, at a Google Earth picture of the Maldives’ main island Male at the coordinates 4° 10’ N, 73° 30’ E. You’ll see luxury yachts at the moorings, hotels, buildings, and residences from shore to shore.

Next, here is news, funny or sad depending on your point of view. (Sad anyway about the birds.)

One of the great green developments touted were thousands of wind mills, sorry, wind turbines, installed in California. Under various state governments, generous tax-subsidized handouts were given to manufacturers and buyers of such. But now, some 14,000 of such turbines are cluttering the landscape of the western US, without producing any power whatsoever. Their gear boxes are broken and they just keep on flailing without generating anything. (But they still keep shredding any bird getting into their path). As the tax subsidies have disappeared, it is not even profitable to repair them any longer, even with the existing (and generous) “feed-in” tariffs. Of course, the groups which were early in the game and have all left the game since, were the real winners. Who cares about any electricity actually being produced?

Dr. Kaiser concludes that “the green bubble has burst”.

We hope he’s right.

The Reverend Dr. Peter Mullen, rector of the delightfully named St Sepulchre-without-Newgate in the City of London (and a conservative with whom I have had the pleasure of co-operating on the battlefield of British politics – JB) has written this article about Richard Dawkins’s views on whether God comes into the purview of scientific enquiry. Dr. Mullen thinks he does not, and we agree with him. 

Dawkins is not  … an intelligent atheist. … For example, he writes: “Either God exists or he doesn’t. It is a scientific question. The existence of God is a scientific question, like any other.”

This is idiotic. Science investigates material phenomena, observable entities in the universe. No competent theologians or philosophers – not even the atheist ones – have ever declared that God (if he exists) is an object in his own universe. Perhaps there is no God, and intelligent Christians readily admit that there may be some legitimate doubt. But if the Judaeo-Christian God exists, then he is the maker of the universe and not an entity within it.

It is not the business of science to ask if there is a God. It is not a scientific question. Science is concerned with nature, not the supernatural. (See our review of Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion, by C.Gee.)

It may be that Christians are tragically misled and that there is no God. But before you rush into atheism, you have to know something about philosophical reasoning and how theology works. In other words you have to know what it is about and what it is not about. When he discusses religious belief, Dawkins does not know what he is talking about. And to fire off ignorant opinions is only the first mark of a fool.

We don’t think Dawkins is a fool. Far from it. His books on evolution are wonderfully reasoned. But we disagree with him on political issues as well as on this one.

It is as if I should presume to lecture the zoologist Dawkins on his own subject: as if I should idiotically declare that all the subtleties of modern biological science could be summed up in a book entitled Janet and John Look at Frogs.

By contrast, there have been, and no doubt are still, competent atheists. If I were asked to name my favourite atheist, I would say David Hume. Hume was a thorough-going atheist, a man who on his deathbed declined the consolations of religion, saying: “I am dying as fast as my enemies, if I have any, could wish, and as easily and cheerfully as my best friends could desire.”

Moreover, the atheist David Hume did not possess an irrational, inhumane, roaring opposition to men of faith. He was a close friend of that great English Christian, Samuel Johnson. Unlike Dawkins, Hume did not wish to obliterate Christianity from the public realm.

Well, he might have, even if he didn’t say so.

Though we don’t have “an irrational, inhumane, roaring opposition to men of faith”, only a rational opposition to their ideas, we would be happy to see the obliteration of Christianity and all religion – by argument, not force.

Newt Gingrich said:

I believe if somebody goes around and says you don’t have a right to exist, they’re probably not prepared to negotiate for peace. I think if someone says they wanna wipe you out, you should believe them. So I see a much more tougher-minded, and much more honest approach to the Middle East in a Gingrich administration. … If I’m even-handed between a civilian democracy that obeys the rule of law, and a group of terrorists who are firing missiles everyday, that’s not even-handed. That’s favoring the terrorists. …  I believe that the Jewish people have the right to have a state … remember there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community. …  For a variety of political reasons we have sustained this war against Israel now since the 1940’s, and I think it’s tragic.

Newt Gingrich is absolutely right. There never was, in all history, a State of Palestine.

There could have been. In 1947, and many times since, Arab leaders turned down offers of territory which could be a Palestinian state. Their condition of acceptance has always been that a State of Palestine must exist instead of a State of Israel. Not beside it, but exactly where it is – all the territory over which the Israelis have legitimate sovereignty.

Arab historians attest to there having been no “Palestinian nation”.

Professor Philip Hitti told the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry into the Palestine problem in 1946:

There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not.

Professor Albert Hourani wrote on September 3, 1967, in The Observer:

A common land and language, a common political fate, and the shock of exile created a Palestinian Arab nation.

When Israel came into existence in 1948, on a tiny part of what had been the vast Ottoman empire – out of which several Arab states had also been created – the Arab states launched a war against it, and some 700,000 Arabs fled from their homes. Most of them remained within the borders of the area that had been the British mandate of “Palestine” since the end of the First World War. They were kept by their fellow Arabs – the Jordanian and Egyptian governments – in a condition of homelessness. Those governments could have created one or even two Palestinian states, but to allow the refugees a state of their own would have meant accepting the fact that Israel existed on what they claimed was “Arab land”, and that they would not do.

It was this homelessness and enforced separateness from other Arabs which turned the Palestinian Arabs into a nation. It can therefore be said that Zionism evoked “Palestinism”; that Israel cast a shadow – Palestine. The “Palestinians” came into existence alongside and because of the Israeli nation.

Contrary to widespread belief among politicians and would-be peace negotiators of the Western world, it is not the size of Israel that the Arabs object to, but that it should exist at all. The Arab case is that Israel has no “right” to exist. And this being so, negotiations for a “two state solution” are nugatory. If the Arab side enters talks at all, it is only to reiterate that they will never recognize Israel as a legitimate state; never recognize its “right to exist”. As Israelis are being asked absurdly to negotiate their own elimination, it is never Israel’s fault that such talks make no progress.

This is the first time a leading Western politician has spoken the truth about the “Palestinians” publicly, boldly and clearly. If Newt Gingrich becomes president of the USA, and does not allow the State Department to program him to utter its traditional falsehoods (which it won’t if John Bolton is appointed Secretary of State), the political tide that has been flowing so strongly and for so long in favor of the Arabs, may turn at last. It may have already begun to turn with candidate Gingrich’s statement of the truth. The degree of outrage with which Arab leaders and their sympathizers have reacted, is a signal that they see and fear a rising opposition at last to their campaign of lies, denigration, and relentless violence against Israel.

Jillian Becker  December 11, 2011

A shooter shoots at cars and drivers randomly in the streets of Hollywood, shouting “Allahu Akbar!”

God responded to the call. He “looked down” on one man and let only his car window suffer.

Atlas Shrugs reports:

Police have so far found no motive in the shooting.

Try as they might, they cannot think what it could be. A real head-scratcher!

P.S. December 12, 2001: This report ascribes a personal motive to the shooter. The witness in the video who heard him shout “Allahu akbar!” may have misheard. But our point that the shouting of “Allahu akbar!’ is officially disregarded these days as evidence of Islamic affiliation and participation in the on-going jihad remains valid.

We quote from a column by Judge Andrew Napolitano consisting entirely of questions. It has a strong libertarian theme which we like.

We think most of the questions are good – after the opening paragraph in which he assumes that “our rights come from God” and that we have “immortal souls”.

What if our rights didn’t come from God or from our humanity, but from the government? What if the government really thinks we’re not unique individuals with immortal souls, but just public property?

He offers an alternative to God as the source of “our rights”  in our “humanity”, implying that we have natural rights; in other words, because we exist we have a “right” to exist. In whose eyes? Who will enforce such a right? Our fellow human beings? If that were so there’d be no murder.

We prefer to say “we should be free to …” rather than “we have a right to…”. But we’ll accept that in the context of this article the two statements amount to the same idea: the paramount importance of freedom.

What if we were only entitled to our natural rights if it pleased the government? What if our rights could be stripped away whenever the government considers us to be its enemy?

What if this could all be accomplished with the consent of the people? What if the people’s own representatives subverted the Constitution?

As they do.

What if the people were so afraid that they accepted the subversion?

Accept it they do, whether out of fear or inadvertence or apathy.

What if the government demonizes an external enemy and uses fear of that enemy to suppress our freedoms? What if people are afraid to protest? …

What if threats become imminent dangers precisely because the government allowed them to happen? What if government scapegoating of an external enemy is as old as the government itself? What if the government has used scapegoating again and again to scare people into giving up their freedoms voluntarily? What if the government has relied on this to perform the same magical disappearing-freedom act time and again throughout history?

He doesn’t name a threat (though later he implies it is the Islamic jihad, which we think is real). But isn’t the “imminent danger” that government threatens us with now “climate change”? Isn’t carbon dioxide, the food of all green plants, the “scapegoat”?

What if the government could lock you up and throw you in jail indefinitely? …

What if you were just speaking out against the government and it came to silence you? What if the government could declare you its enemy and then kill you?

As many governments in the ghastly Third World do.  And as they’re doing again in post-Soviet Russia (see here and here for examples).

What if your elected representatives did nothing to stop the government from doing this? …  What if the government’s goal was to be rid of all who disagreed with it?

What if the real war was a war of misinformation? What if the government constructs its own reality in order to suit its own agenda? What if civil liberties don’t mean anything to the government? What if the government just chooses to allow you to exercise them freely because you don’t threaten it at the moment? What if the government released a report calling you a domestic terror threat, just because you disagreed with the government?

As the Obama administration has done.

What if the government coaxed crazy people into acting like terrorists, just to keep you afraid?

Does he think that’s happening in the United States? We don’t think it is.

What if the government persuaded you to believe that the greatest threat to your freedom is an impoverished and uneducated Third World population 10,000 miles away?

If he means Afghans, for instance, we agree with his implication that it is no threat. But Iran, which is not so impoverished or uneducated, is a serious threat.

What if the real threat to your freedom is a rich, powerful and all-seeing government? What if that government thinks it can write any law, regulate any behavior and tax any event no matter what the Constitution says?

As does the present too powerful government of the United States. Though it isn’t rich (governments own no wealth), it robs the citizens. And it’s by no means all-seeing; blinkered, rather, if not blind. (Perhaps he means all-spying.)

What if the government is always the greatest threat to freedom because only the government can constitute a monopoly on the use of force? What if, in fact, at its essence, government is simply a monopoly of force? What if, in fact, at its essence, government is simply the negation of freedom? What if the government monopoly incubated, aided and abetted enemies’ freedoms?

As the Obama administration incubates, aids and abets Islamic violence? (See our post Spreading darkness, November 19, 2011.)

What if, when the danger got more threatening, the government told you to sacrifice more of your liberties for safety? What if you fell for that?

As when nations let their governments provide benefits such as “free” health care, and so gain the power decide who will be treated and who not, who may live and who must die?

What if those who traded liberty for safety ended up in internment camps?

As happened to tens of millions of people who let their countries fall under communism.

What if the greatest threat to freedom was not any outfit of thugs in some cave in a far-off land …

Now he plainly means Afghanistan …

… but an organized force here at home? What if that organized force broke its own laws? What if that organized force did the very same things to those it hates and fears that it prosecutes people for doing to it? What if I’m right and the government’s wrong? What if it’s dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if government is essentially wrong and always dangerous?

What if these weren’t just hypothetical or rhetorical questions? What if this is actually happening to us? What if the ultimate target in the government’s war on terror [countering the jihad] is all who believe in personal freedom? What if that includes YOU? What do we do about it?

If government is always essentially wrong and always dangerous, is there anything we can do except recognize that government is a necessary evil, and limit its power as best we can? Isn’t that what the men who wrote the Constitution of the United States recognized and accomplished? Isn’t defending the Constitution the best thing Americans can do to stay free?

Now we have the UN pitching plans — again — for taxes on world commerce that would pluck scores of billions directly from the private sector every year, and send this lucre through the skimmers of the UN system, to be reallocated as the UN might prefer.

In a PJ Media article, Claudia Rosett – by far the most illuminating and reliable authority on the UN and its iniquities – writes:

Never mind where you might stand on the question of global warming, global cooling, climate change or plain old weather. If there’s one constant to this entire climate debate, it is that in the name of “climate,” the United Nations wishes to regulate and tax the economy of the planet — stripping resources from the most productive economies to hand them out as assorted UN bureaucrats deem fit. 

This is an agenda for global central planning — which, at the extreme, is what the Soviet Union envisioned as the radiant future of mankind, at least until the USSR itself collapsed as a basket case of monstrously misallocated resources, pervaded by the nightmare repression required to enforce such a system. Nonetheless, at the UN this agenda keeps coming up, year after year, at one climate conference after another.

The proclamations of emergency have varied, but always, in the middle of it, there is the UN, proposing to serve as planner and traffic cop for global commerce — a role that entails the UN aiming to redirect resources and collecting a cut to cover the administrative enterprises of its own neo-colonial empire of agencies, organizations, intergovernmental outfits, programs and special envoys. Somehow that already includes a need for climate conferees to travel great distances at other people’s expense …

Right now, at the UN Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa, they’re at it again, conferring for a fortnight. There, they are trying to design a “Green Climate Fund,” hoping to impose some form of global taxes that would bring in some $100 billion per year, to be redistributed to countries the UN decides are most at risk from change in climate. Reports have been emerging that the UN is eyeing a “carbon” tax on shipping, or international financial transactions, or cross-border aviation. Of course, this would raise the cost of commerce for everyone, so there is a further proposal, reports AFP, to use some of the money to compensate developing countries, at the expense of the most productive countries, for the higher costs. Such an arrangement would presumably require yet more intervention from the UN, since someone would have to decide which countries should be compensated, and to what extent — presumably a changing scene, as economic shifts occur — and of course there would be a need for more international bureaucrats to administer such a scheme. It’s also a good bet that more UN bureaucrats would also devote some of their time to coming up with yet more global tax schemes. The possibilities are staggering.

As a recipe for corruption of monumental scope, this is brilliant.It would open money spigots on a scale the UN to date has only dreamt of. …

The UN is a collective, encased in immunity, prone to horrific waste and abuse, and likewise prone to endless promises of reform and transparency which never quite work out — because there is no mechanism to hold the UN to account, or require that its officials comply with their promises. Even the U.S., which contributes 22% of the UN’s core budget, pours billions into the UN system, and periodically tries to clean the place up, has scant luck. In the 193-member General Assembly, the U.S. casts only one vote. The General Assembly budget process is one in which the U.S. provides the biggest share of the money, and a majority of other states out-vote the U.S. in deciding how it will be spent.

The UN must not be allowed to tax us. The UN must not be allowed to become the world’s Kremlin. The UN must be destroyed.

Ayn Rand wants  “the separation of state and economics“.

And so do we.

The job satisfaction of  TSA (Transport Security Administration) assaulters and voyeurs employed at airports to feel up their victims and ogle naked bodies may be spoilt soon. They may be replaced by mice.

Here’s a report on new technology for the detection of drugs and explosives:

Israeli startup Bioexplorers has developed a new and unique way to sniff out terrorists – literally. After years of research, company CEO Eran Lumbroso [says that] Bioexplorers has hit upon a foolproof, non-invasive and easy method to detect contraband in purses, luggage and even cargo – using mice.

It’s no joke. “Mice have an excellent sense of smell, and they’re relatively easy to train. And they’re easier to use for odor detection than other animals traditionally used for their olfactory capabilities.” …

Here’s how it works: A person passes through a passageway in which a Bioexplorers system is installed. A fan passes air into a sensor receptor, and delivers it into a chamber with several mice. The mice, having gone through intensive behavioral training, sniff the air. If the odor is one associated with items the mice have been trained to recognize, like drugs or bombs, they move into another chamber – setting off an alarm. Security officers can then move in and stop the appropriate suspect. …

“The entire procedure is far less invasive or intimidating than the alternatives, like using dogs or X-ray machines,” says Lumbroso. “There’s no radiation, and no concern about being seen naked,” he adds.

The system is appropriate for use in any setting – airports, government buildings, shopping malls. In fact, the company has conducted several tests at sites in Israel to ensure that the sensors work in real situations, including at Tel Aviv’s Azrieli Mall. More than 1,000 people passed through a Bioexplorers sensor – some having been given “suspicious” objects and substances to hold – and the mice made the right call every time, says Lumbroso.

The mice won’t touch you. You won’t even see them.

The rodents employed on this security detail are specially raised lab mice, “which are very clean, and there is no chance that they will transfer diseases to humans, since there is no contact between the mice and the people passing through the sensor,” says Lumbroso. …

They enjoy exemplary work conditions.

The mice are treated well; they “work” for four hours, and then rest for eight, to ensure they don’t experience sensory overload.

Each mouse’s “career” can be expected to last for about two years, and each sensor installation is staffed by four to eight mice. In order to prevent “false positives,” more than one mouse has to respond to the odor and move into the second chamber. …

Their future is bright – to hospitals and beyond.

“We are also looking at developing systems for medical use, in which the mice can detect growths or other problems by smell, without the need for invasive procedures,” Lumbroso says. …

The invention is selling. The mice will go abroad to many countries as mercenaries in the “war on terror”:

“Chances are good that in another year or so, you’ll be passing through a Biosensor system when you travel somewhere.”

This is the essence of what the 2012 election is all about. Either we’re going to have a Constitutional republic run by the people we elect to run it, or we’ll continue to be subjected to the whims of an international cartel which privatizes profits and socializes losses, even as they threaten the autonomy of every democracy in the world in the process.

We quote from an article by Arnold Ahlert. He writes at Canada Free Press:

Americans, whether they know or not, are in for the fight of their lives. It’s been one week since the biggest story of the last three years was published by Bloomberg News, and maybe the only thing more fascinating than the story itself is the level of indifference it’s gotten from our so-called mainstream media. Remember the $700 billion in TARP funds used to bail out the banks? Chump change. Or more to the point, collateral for the $7.77 trillion made available by the Federal Reserve to bail out financial institutions all over the world.

That’s right, all over the world. Back in August, the facade was partially pierced when the number on the bailout went from $700 billion up to $1.2 trillion. That’s when it was revealed that almost half of the Fed’s top 30 borrowers were European firms, including Royal Bank of Scotland, Zurich-based UBS, Belgium-based Dexia SA and France’s Societe Generale SA.

Now we discover that even the $1.2 trillion was a crock. Or rather Bloomberg News discovered it, after filing a Freedom of Information Act petition that took more than two years to wend its way through the courts. Bloomberg got the information after the Supreme Court rejected an appeal last March by the Clearing House Association LLC, a group comprised of the nation’s largest commercial banks. They, along with Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, tried to prevent the details from becoming public. If it were up to them, Americans still wouldn’t know a thing.

Its a scheme in which the Feds made available an amount of money equal to half of America’s Gross National Product for an entire year. Furthermore, on a single day, December 5, 2008, the banks were in such dire straits they needed a combined $1.2 trillion to remain solvent. How duplicitous were the bankers themselves? A little more than a week before this level of borrowing occurred, former Bank of America CEO Kenneth D. Lewis, informed shareholders that B of A was “one of the strongest and most stable major banks in the world,” despite owing the Federal Reserve $86 billion at the time. In a March 26 letter to shareholders, JP Morgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon claimed his firm used the Fed’s Term Auction Facility (TAF) “at the request of the Federal Reserve to help motivate others to use the system”—even though his bank’s total borrowings were nearly twice its cash holdings. …

Last week it was also announced that several central banks are making “cheaper” dollars available to bailout the socialist basket cases in the EU. Cheap money for Europe means higher prices for Americans, as once again Bernanke and Company are debasing the currency and holding Americans hostage to the ransom demands of bankers, who once again are telling us systemic failure awaits if we refuse to kowtow to their demands.

So let me tell you what’s at stake here. It’s something that transcends Democrat and Republican, left and right, conservative and liberal. The real dividing line is between those who stillbelieve in … national sovereignty, and the New World Order supra-nationalists, for whom countries are little more than an annoying impediment getting in the way of their one world government schemes.

Even now Europeans are being told that the only way out from under the current crisis is to grant the European Commission the power to approve national budgets—before each country’s parliament gets to vote on them. If that sounds like the “making you an offer you can’t refuse” schtick from the Godfather, that’s because it is. No more Greeks or Italians deciding what’s best for Greece or Italy, flawed as those decisions might be. It’s take it or leave it from … bureaucrats in Brussels … whose unbridled arrogance gave the world an EU that was doomed to failure from the start. …

And where is Congress, who ought to be making it crystal clear that the United States Federal Reserve has no business bailing out an EU that steadfastly refuses to put its own house in order?

Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy want to start the EU all over again with a new treaty that binds the individual nations more tightly together – in other words to make Europe, with all its different languages, cultures, histories, interests, strengths and weaknesses, into a single state.

The EU is failing precisely because the attempt to bind the nations into a “United States of Europe” has proved impossible. Merkel and Sarkozy are prescribing a more intense dose of the killing disease as a cure for it.

If a tighter union were agreed to by the member states of the present EU, what it would mean in practice is the Germanization of all Europe. Germany as the strongest economic power would dominate the continent. It would be the realization of a long-standing German ambition. Germany would achieve through the power of economic success what it twice failed to achieve in the last century with military might. It would be a dictatorial domination. How else could Greeks and Italians be brought to work like Germans? And Europe – aka Greater Germany – will not, cannot, be a welfare state; the dream of socialism, which became ever more of a nightmare, is over.  

The EU was established  in the first place to satisfy the need of Germany to dissolve its guilt  – for the Second World War and the Holocaust – in the big pond of Europe; and the (paradoxically) nationalistic desire  of France to put on more muscle  – a vaster population, a zone of freely moving capital and labor – so it could rival the United States as a power in the world.  Yet France will not mind being dominated by Germany. It collaborated all too willingly with the Third Reich. (The French “resistance” is largely a myth, such resistance as there was being small, bitterly divided, and mainly Communist.)

The best hope for Europe would be a dissolution of the EU. Britain should withdraw from it as soon as possible. The EU idea was never popular in Britain, and if a referendum on continued membership were held now, the votes against it would almost certainly be in the majority – which is precisely why the Conservative government, which promised to hold such a referendum if it came to power, now won’t take the risk. Almost all the politicians of Europe love the (non-democratic) EU because it provides them with a bigger stage to strut on.

Our view, cold and hard, is that it would be a good thing if the Euro collapsed and the European Union broke into its constituent national pieces. The United States should be doing everything it can to disentangle itself from the banks of Europe, and refrain from helping any continuation of its ruinous welfare socialism. And Americans must save themselves from the fate Europe brought upon itself by voting to strengthen national sovereignty and  keep their Republic.