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The principle underpinning the EU is not "We, the people" but "We know better than the people" — not just on capital punishment and the single curren… - Mark Steyn
" "The principle underpinning the EU is not "We, the people" but "We know better than the people" — not just on capital punishment and the single currency, but on pretty much anything that comes to mind. Not so long ago, Jean-Pierre Chevenement, France's Defence Minister at the time, insisted that the United States was dedicated to the "organized cretinization of our people." As a dismissal of American pop culture — MTV, Disney — this statement is not without its appeal, though it sounds better if you've never had the misfortune to sit through a weekend of continental television. But the reality is that nobody is as dedicated to the proposition that the people are cretins than M. Chevenement and the panjandrums of the new 'Europe.' The EU is organized on this assumption. If, like the Danes and now the Irish, they're impertinent enough to tick the wrong box in referenda on deeper European integration, we'll just keep asking and re-asking the question until they get it right.
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About Mark Steyn
Mark Steyn (born December 8, 1959) is a Canadian journalist, broadcaster, columnist, and film and theatre critic.
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We are witnessing the end of the late 20th-century progressive welfare democracy. Its fiscal bankruptcy is merely a symptom of a more fundamental bankruptcy: its insufficiency as an animating principle for society. The children and grandchildren of those fascists and republicans who waged a bitter civil war for the future of Spain now shrug when a bunch of foreigners blow up their capital. Too sedated even to sue for terms, they capitulate instantly. Over on the other side of the equation, the modern multicultural state is too watery a concept to bind huge numbers of immigrants to the land of their nominal citizenship. So they look elsewhere and find the jihad. The Western Muslim’s pan-Islamic identity is merely the first great cause in a world where globalized pathologies are taking the place of old-school nationalism.
It's not a clash between civilisations but within them - in the Muslim world, between what's left of moderate traditional Islam and an extreme strain of that faith that even many of their co-religionists have difficulty living with; and in the West between those who think this culture is worth defending and those who'd rather sleepwalk to national suicide while mumbling bromides about whether Western hedonism is to blame for 'lack of services for locals' in Bali. To read Robert Frisk and Margo Kingston is like watching a panto cast on drugs: No matter how often the baddies say, 'I'm behind you!', Robert and Margo reply, 'Oh, no, you're not!'
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Most mainline Protestant churches are, to one degree or another, post-Christian. If they no longer seem disposed to converting the unbelieving to Christ, they can at least convert them to the boggiest of soft-left clichés, on the grounds that if Jesus were alive today he’d most likely be a gay Anglican bishop in a committed relationship driving around in an environmentally friendly car with an “Arms are for Hugging” sticker on the way to an interfaith dialogue with a Wiccan and a couple of Wahhabi imams.
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