In Europe, over several decades, there were numerous warnings about the creation of what would become the European Union. Those who saw the full intention of its early promoters sounded many alarms about the loss of sovereignty for their nations to a burgeoning “Eurostate.” But the concerns raised over previous years didn’t stop the piece-by-piece progression toward one central government for all of Europe. Many throughout the continent are now seeing where they are being taken.
In 2003, for instance, British authors Christopher Booker and Richard North weighed in with their condemnation of the sovereignty compromising European Union in a full-length book entitled The Great Deception: The Secret History of the European Union. It awakened some. In that same year, Czech Republic President Václav Klaus objected to the creation of a European Union Constitution designed to govern each of the EU’s member states. With its clearly stated subservience to the United Nations, the document stated: “… this Constitution establishes a European Union [that] shall have primacy over the law of member states.” Of this proposed EU Constitution, Klaus said passage would mean “there will be no more sovereign states in Europe — only one state will remain.” He pointed to EU headquarters in Brussels at the seat of that eventual “one state.”
In 2005, when voters were asked to approve the new EU Constitution, those in France and Holland soundly rejected it. Dealt a stinging rebuke but not a defeat, the Eurocrats regrouped and in 2006 sent the proposed Constitution (now termed a “treaty”) for another try at ratification. They didn’t send it back to the people, however. It was sent to national leaders who met in Lisbon and, there, it won unanimous acceptance and became the dominant government for all of the 25 EU nations.
In Britain over the past few decades, a newly formed United Kingdom Independence Party gathered increasing strength with its call for withdrawal from the EU. On June 23, the people of Britain will get a chance to reject EU membership in a long-promised referendum. Supporters of leaving, collectively known as the Brexit (BRitish EXIT) movement, may well pull their country out of the EU. If they prevail, other nations where negativity about EU membership has grown are likely to follow.
On March 15, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán delivered a major speech in which he blamed “Brussels” for the massive immigration of Middle Eastern refugees into Europe. He thundered, “Today Europe is as fragile, weak, and sickly as a flower being eaten away by a worm.” Pointing to numerous attitudes that he and others were “forbidden” by political correctness to mention, he nevertheless noted that Europe was “threatened by migration,” that “immigration brings crime and terror,” that the arriving masses “endanger our way of life, our culture, our customs, and our Christian civilization,” and that Brussels is “now making a plan for a United States of Europe” that will accomplish destruction of each European nation state. He added that Hungary would refuse to accept hundreds of thousands of Islamic immigrants (as Germany has already done) in a “forced resettlement scheme.”
Yes, many more Europeans are awakening to the designs of the European Union’s leaders whose goal, said Orbán, is to “blend cultures, religions and populations until our proud Europe will finally become bloodless and docile … swallowed up in the enormous belly of the United States of Europe.” And he called on his countrymen and fellow Europeans “to defeat, rewrite, and transform the fate intended for us.” His countrymen owe him a great debt of appreciation.
Such awareness and the accompanying courage to publicly speak out about the very real threats to Europe’s nations are welcome developments. The rising tide of resistance in Britain to EU dominance is more good news. Similar awareness and courage must also arise and grow here in the United States because plans have already been formulated to do to our country, along with Mexico and Canada, what has been done in Europe.
John F. McManus is president emeritus of The John Birch Society. This column appeared originally at the insideJBS blog and is reprinted here with permission.
