Learning from the EU Experiment (III): The Taboo of Intra-European Conflict
I recently spoke with a staffer working for a mainstream Member of the European Parliament (MEP). We were discussing her boss’ hiring practices and I found that the young politician was willing to employ someone of just about any political background except someone who had worked with nationalist parties like the French National Front. I was indignant at first. What intellectual intolerance! What closed-mindedness! Harming someone’s career prospects purely out of political prejudice!
But after some reflection, I thought better of it: All societies have taboos which lead to social ostracism and censorship of wrongthinkers, as White Nationalists and European Identitarians in particular know too well. A good taboo achieves this through the spontaneous action and revulsion of society itself, not through official government persecution and censorship. My problem with the MEP wasn’t with his adherence to a taboo; indeed it showed he had some moral or ideological principle even though I might disagree with it, but rather that this particular taboo is undermining the future of European peoples. We’ve seen this taboo at work in the massive media reaction against Jean-Marie Le Pen when he reached the second round of the presidential elections in 2002 and in the European and international pressure against Austria when Jörg Haider joined the government in 2000. As a rule I strongly favor effective free speech, but perhaps we rather need to perform the inverse rather than try to eliminate this phenomenon of social ostracism (which is as old as human nature): That in all European and European-derived societies, any attacks on ethnic Europeans should be taboo leading to social ostracism.
Joseph Stalin once dismissed the head of the Catholic Church saying: “The Pope! How many divisions has he got?” The European Union and its institutions are in much the same position: Their authority and influence are primarily moral and institutional, the force of norms and of habit. Unlike the United States Federal Government, Eurocrats have no soldiers to enforce their authority at gunpoint upon recalcitrant states. Even the eurozone, where the European Central Bank’s (ECB) power to blackmail and even topple national governments is real, the EU’s power is premised on the refusal of national governments to print their own money. But the ECB, and anyone else for that matter, would be powerless to stop a government if it wished to do so. Read more