Friday, November 02, 2007

And the Beginning of Another Successful 5-year Plan is Set to Begin



Reeking of the awkwardness of the weekly Soviet “international socialist friendship meetings” in the 70’s of fake amity between, say, the “Soviet Peoples” and the charming peasant folk/proletarians of, for example, Mozambique or Mongolia (playing along with the domestic propaganda for some goods, fuel, weapons, or cash) – the EU is pumping the “pan-European” nature of, well, just about anything possible including the past. It assumes people individually can be coerced into believing that they’re simply part of “a people” in the classic totalitarian sense, and can eventually be made to believe anything.

“The chief function (of propaganda) is to convince the masses, whose slowness of understanding needs to be given time in order that they may absorb information; and only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea on their mind ... The success of any advertisement, whether of a business or a political nature, depends upon the consistency and perseverance with which it is employed.”


- From Joachim Fest,’s “Das Gesicht des Dritten Reiches, Profile einer totalitären Herrschaft”, quoting August Kubizek, a boyhood friend of Adolf Hitler.

One overdone example is a show in Brussels that’s been promoted for at least 8 months titled “Le Grand Atelier: Chemins de l’art en Europe (Ve – XVIIe siècle)” which you can read about at Brussels Journal:

For all its considerable merits, ‘Le Grand Atelier’ is to a certain extent art in the service of the European dream. In light of Oxford professor Jan Zielonka’s latest writings on the ‘neo-medieval’ paradigm at work in the EU project, it is at least worthwhile to investigate the deep cultural history of pan-European trends. Nonetheless, one is immediately confronted with a sad irony. Elsewhere in the splendid Beaux-Arts complex, one can see the triumphant Gustaf Wappers oil-on-canvas Episode from September Days 1830 (on the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville in Brussels), a sort of Belgian (and hence Rubensian) La Liberté guidant le peuple. Yet now, all over Brussels, the Belgian tricolour flag is manifested rather differently. It hangs limply and pleadingly from city windows, or is brandished in the occasional solidarité marches (‘un dieu, un roi, une nation’ proclaimed one banner I ran across of late) that crisscross the capital of a country reeling from popular linguistic-nationalisms
And that’s all they seem to have to work with, which is why one would even need to scratch at promoting things like a ‘neo-medieval paradigm’ to begin with. ...not to mention their Reubensian bits.

Message to themselves? Something about a “pan-European solidarity” does indeed bear heavily on the distant past and constructed emotions because it would have to – just to get itself beyond it’s immediate past, even as recent as the years of rationalization about letting the mass killings in the former Yugoslavia sort themselves out.

That aside, let’s just look at the basis of all of this: European tribalism both on the ground and in the mind. To begin with, the reason that you can’t go more than 150 km in northern Europe without employing another language is because historically people had little or no contact with one another, except for the “exchange of amity” on the battlefield or using an elite of intermediaries while doing commerce. They spent more than a millennium killing one another and trying the same schtick on everyone else, and their “enlightened” ideas (Fascism, Marxism, Socialism) have murdered and impoverished hundreds of millions.

Absurdly, their aspirations for seeing themselves as a example of a population at peace are based on the fact that most of them have taken a break from their chop-chop-Saturday-afternoons for the past 60 years while globally relevant entities were actually protecting them.

And yet, and yet... they think that the way these pint-sized sub-entities deal with one another while mumbling laudatory things about themselves in the mirror entitles a well placed elite in media and institutions to rattle on about the very same notions that nearly killed the rest of us (i.e. Fascism, Marxism, Socialism,) and the supposed recklessness, anti-trans-nationalism, and backwardness of America.

Quite simply – after decades of having the rest of the world shelter them, their emotions, their fragile egos, the “people in Solidarity’s” collective self-esteem is in a state where it actually requires *propaganda* in spite of decades of “an ever closer union” being pitched to them and constructing itself in the same way Paris ‘liberated itself’ from the Nazis.

Harder still will be training INTO these very same people an affection for any sort of nation which at odds with the TRANS-nationalism that they imagine the EU itself, if not all peace that has ever existed. The meme-droppers have their work cut out for them. While notions of ‘post-medieval notions of self’ will have to be examined, the elephant in the room of the EU’s future past history is their first meaningful unifying entity in the modern age which was not even a thing of their true making:

NATO.

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