The Swiss voted to reduce immigration Sunday. They are not members of the EU, but have a “Special Relationship.” Their EU self-appointed overseers did not like it and are expressing their disdain for the citizens of Switzerland for valuing their sovereignty, and will do whatever they think they can get away with to destroy the will of this nation’s free citizens.
The parallels with America ought to be widely recognized. In America the States created the federal government and gave it specific, limited powers. America became an economic powerhouse. The federal government began abusing the powers it was given, and took – is taking – ever-more. America’s freedom and economic liberty are in decline.
In Europe, the States created the EU and gave it many, probably too many, powers. And now they cannot control it – any more than in America we can control the federal government. So they are beginning to rebel. First around the periphery, as did Switzerland in a small way Sunday, and in the US, where an increasing number of States simply are nullifying federal laws such as Obamacare, and where legislation is beginning to be introduced to refuse to supply NSA data centers with water & power, effectively shutting down this violation of the Fourth Amendment in our Bill of Rights.
These nullifications doubtless will be tested by the federal government in the federal Supreme Court. This is, of course, ludicrous: the Supreme Court is a creation of the States, along with the rest of the federal government, and one does not request permission from an inferior level of government.
Arizona recently passed a law that did nothing more than mirror federal immigration law that the federal government has refused to enforce; the federal government sued them, squashing the sovereignty neither Arizona, nor any American State ever relinquished (under international law, sovereignty only can be relinquished through formal written documentation; no American State ever has relinquished its sovereignty; we simply formed a federal government to deal with specific, enumerated needs – and no more).
In America and the EU the federal governments are stealing liberty from the People.
In America and in Europe, the People are resisting.
The post-war economic model of the welfare state has bankrupted every Western nation. People perfectly capable of working refuse to – and in exchange for their votes, get free healthcare, food, housing, clothing and education (or what passes for it). Politicians are taking money from future generations to buy votes to retain power today. This is what “welfare” is all about. We have spent since 1964 over $16T on anti-poverty programs and not lowered the poverty rate at all – but we have created tens of millions of voters completely dependent on government – and a government completely dependent on their votes.
The West is bankrupt; it is just making-up its “money.”
In America and in Europe, the People are resisting.
Viewed by the Right and Center, the Left has failed to deliver the prosperity it promised.
Viewed by the Left, the failure has been not redistributing enough money.
Western “useful idiots” always have excused the failure of socialism/communism as “not really being tried,” i.e. not redistributing enough money, not creating the utopia in which all work for all with a smile on their faces. Those who refuse to participate are excused from participating, much as the Democrats in America today are selling as a “benefit” the 23M jobs not being created because of Obamacare, as relieving their voters of adult work to go and adolescently “pursue their dreams,” while requiring productive people, nearly always NOT Democrat voters, to pay their bills.
Useful idiots – and Center/Independent voters who join their “feel good” voting patterns – do not grasp that this non-participation is not just about jobs. The Left – globally – is not having children; they are not participating in the most basic responsibility of any species: reproduction. And so not only are they stealing from future generations, they are refusing to populate those generations to help pay the bills. But – because they will have no presence in that future, they just do not care.
Today’s Left is in power – and they have more power than they have ever had. In the West that first gave the world individual liberty, the catastrophic failures of the welfare state have given the Left what may be insurmountable power. America and Europe have freely given-away their birthright of freedom and liberty to the Left in exchange for meals, phones and doctors paid for by the Right of today and tomorrow.
In Europe resistance comes from the national parties rising in France, the UK, Netherlands, Switzerland, and even Germany. In America resistance began with the Tea Party, which unfortunately allowed itself to be co-opted and taken over by Progressives from the Right – those who put their opinion over the Rule of law, as do Progressives of the Left. But resistance is growing across the West to these tyrannical power grabs.
The rising nationalist parties in Europe are being trashed in the name of “nationalism,” which many on the Left view as the cause of the rise of NAZI Germany. They honestly believe that nationalism can ONLY lead to war. In fact, their rejection of nationalism is what will cause the next war, in which the people will take back the power the despots of the Left in America and the EU have taken.
Nationalism CAN be bad: NAZI Germany. Imperial Japan.
Nationalism also can be good: The national cultures of ALL Western nations stem from Nationalism. As did the ability of Americans to rescue Europeans from themselves twice in the 20th Century.
It is not nationalism that is bad; it is the use to which it may be put by a dictator.
The same cannot be said of socialism. Socialism IS bad; its entire reason for being is to take from some the fruit of their labor to give it to others who will keep the dictators in power for the price of a few free meals. There IS no good side of socialism.
THIS is what voters continually ceding yet more power to the Left fail to grasp.
What will happen in Europe? I don’t know. They have voted themselves out of guns, and allowed themselves to have liberty removed without a vote. Not one time has the EU “Constitution” passed a continental vote; it’s never had one. The current the Lisbon Treaty was to go into effect in January, 2009. It did not when the Irish – THE ONLY NATION WHOSE CITIZENS WERE ALLOWED TO VOTE FOR THE DESTRUCTION OF THEIR OWN SOVERIGNTY – rejected it. Under pressure, in a second vote the Irish vote ratified it, and it went into effect across Europe in December, 2009 – without any European citizen other than the Irish even allowed to vote on it. Not one nation allowed to vote on its national currency voted to give it up for the euro.
What likely will happen is war. It’s what Europeans do. From 1648 (Westphalia) to 1989, the ONLY 45-yr period of peace in Europe was when sandwiched between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. When the Pact died, Europeans again went to war.
Europeans – the people – now have something again to unite them, two things in fact: the tyranny of the unaccountable EU – and what only can historically, and correctly, be called an “invasion” of millions of people of a culture not only foreign to Western and European traditions, but violently hostile to them, as well, the immigrants of which are killing Europeans, and overriding a millennium of the rule of law.
Americans, with an active tradition of, some say a DNA requiring, resistance to tyranny, will react, too. We have plenty to unite us. We invented the modern state of individual liberty. We WILL fight to retain it. We have NOT voted our guns away.
As an aside – neither has Switzerland.
One of the most interesting characteristics of the Information Age is “disintermediation.” Simply – the world no longer needs huge entities to provide desired products & services that can be gotten better and cheaper without the baggage and overhead of the enormous organizations that grew-up during the Industrial Age.
Another thing we no longer need – or can afford – is huge government, or huge nations. Across the globe technology is providing more information, better goods & services, from smaller companies at a lower cost. To think disintermediation will not hit nations is absurd. Ask the Soviet Union. Or Yugoslavia.
Ask those in several American States now seeking to disintermediate themselves from too-large governments no longer representative of their needs: Maryland, Colorado, California, and more. And, when people finally figure it out, arguably the Red States from the Blue States. No reason exists for those working and raising children, to support with money or votes those refusing to do either. No reason exists for those understanding the constant failure of Progressive economics to continue to lower their families’ standard of living by throwing their money down that rathole.
What – good – purpose is served by a continental America that cannot now be better served by an individual State or small group of States acting in the interest of its citizens? None. If Southern California lacks water, Northern California does not need the federal government to sell it to them. If Nebraska lacks oil, Texas does not need the federal government involved in the deal. If New York lacks food, Kansas will be more than willing to send it to NY markets.
We never again will fight a land war of the size requiring tens of millions of troops, and sea lanes can be kept open by all countries needing them – not just America. No current reason exists for American troops to be stationed in Germany, or any of the literally hundreds of other nations in which they are stationed. America’s defense bill is so high because we are defending nations perfectly capable of defending themselves. This is an absurd waste of America tax dollars. Ending it is not isolationism; its acceptance of the maturity of other nations and the choices they – voluntarily – make; it’s ending the paternalism that we know best what is right for everyone. We don’t.
Will terrorism continue to strike at America? Probably. But in the absence of what historically can only be called interference in foreign nations, resulting from the replacement of American troops with those of their own nations, the drive for terror likely will decline. And where it exists, it can be dealt with as it ought to have been since its inception: Lethally, ruthlessly, immediately. If terrorists start head-hacking others, or detonating themselves in a free State with a population that cares enough about its future to be populating that future and remaining able and willing to defend themselves, those terrorists WILL be killed, and their fellow-travelers made existentially unwelcome. Diplomatic niceties may be of great import to the UN and others for whom the future is only theoretical. But for the rest of us – we WILL kill our enemies and protect our children.
If America has decided not to destroy it existential enemies, Americans have not. No reason exists that nuclear weapons – the correct response to a barbaric pre-modern terror coming from a particular region of the planet to attack and destroy the modern world – cannot be dropped by the Texas Air Force, the Wyoming Air Force or the Free States of America Air Force. Or the Swiss Air Force.
This current concept of limited war is an ahistoric absurdity to which only the uneducated and historically illiterate can cling – along with those seeking salary from the Military Industrial National Security complex. It is an absurdity that among our citizens exist people willing to send others’ kids to kill and die, but who refuse to destroy those destroying our own future: How many Mozarts, Einsteins, Warhols, Faulkners will NEVER be born because their never-to-be-parents lie dead at the hand of illiterate barbarians thousands of miles away?
How many Neil Armstrongs will never fly because we – willingly – are sacrificing their parents for people living, literally, in the Stone Age, and attacking everyone not of their own barbaric tribe?
If a State has goals – including being left alone to pursue its own dreams – and those goals are being threatened from the outside, it is absurd to send the best and brightest of the next generation off to die when the problem can be dealt with, with finality, instantaneously. OUR freedom and OUR children ARE more important that the lives of those attacking our freedoms and children. The Left does not understand this because the Left does not value liberty OR children. To expect the Left to honestly worry about the future is absurd.
And if that State is Texas, or Switzerland, or Ireland, or an agglomeration of liberty-loving American States, that equation doesn’t change, any more than it is altered if the government attacking those goals is an unaccountable EU or American federal government.
It is up to governments – particularly concerning to me, the US government – to begin again to live within the Rule of Law and the specific powers given them by the States. This Rule of Law is what made America great economically, morally and militarily. Contrary to the Left, America isn’t great because of the color of people’s skin, but because of the content of the character of its citizens and those who came here to participate.
But if the power-grabbing, dictatorial Left in Europe and America choose not to, if they choose constantly to push the limits of the law, to constantly increase their despotism, they WILL be destroyed.
The people – and liberty – WILL win. The Left WILL lose. It can take four years or it can take a millennium. But the Left WILL LOSE.
The fight against liberty was begun by the American and European Left. It has progressed enormously.
It is time to join the fight – it can be avoided only by surrender of side or the other.
The Left WILL not surrender.
The Right CAN NOT.