An enquiry into how EU citizenship came into existence, how popular sovereignty is subverted by treasonous politicians in all EU member states, and how the 'rules-based order' renders us all serfs
Since you mention feudalism, have you looked at the ur-germanic concept of odal or odalan? I think the closest modern german wrod would be Bauernhof, if mixed with the concept of heimat: your ancestral land, yours by right of blood heritage.
Odal was law in all of Scandinavia not only pre-christianity but until quite recently (and Norway still has odelsrett in its constitutional law). The word is the probable root of adel (noble).
Based on runic inscriptions, land had to be owned as freehold, no debts or similar, for three to six generations for it to count as odal. When it was declared such, it belonged to the bloodline living there, under the hand of the head of the family.
The justification for the strong protection this had may partially have been due to Od being one of the names for Oden. As god of kings, chiefs and headmen it is logical that his name be invoked to seal the justification and legality of a tradition. Sensible, since the blesser of raven's bounty usually got his way sooner or later, being god of death as well.
What has this rambling collection of thoughts to do with the EU emulating the last days of the Roman Republic? Well, whenever this kind of forced top-down unification has occurred, historically it has been the prelude to great wars, civil or otherwise. From Gaius Julius to Gandhi, nationalism-by-blood-and-creed has always been the only way out for the people and those prospective leaders not invited to the circles of power.
What to do about it? That depends on so many factors for the specific case - but not going along and accepting it goes a long way. The greater public will not be roused until they start going hungry. The bourgeoisie will not annoint a saviour until they are threatened with becoming destitute. Any honest student of history knows what patterns revolutions follow. The issue now is, how to ensure the hypothetical Leader promising a brief period of dictatorship to right all wrongs is a Leader aligned with one's own moral and pragmatical inner compass.
Ha, I had no idea about 'odal', and I shall check this out.
I knew of a number of 'freeholding' considerations, and I wouldn't want the below statement to be misunderstood: despite any number of things that made 'pre-modern' life 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short' (as Hobbes had it), 'feudalism' was a coherent socio-metaphysical outlook, perhaps even a 'system of order', that was remarkably stable.
True, there were ups and downs, and there were many things that made life very hard, too, and while I sure as hell don't want to romanticise it, I'm inclined to believe that this 'stability' was reinforced by (a certain) alignment of values of those who owned the land and those who tilled the soil, typically for them. I other words: peasants and lords shared the same worldview, and while their positions differed (of course, for God-given reasons), they had the same moral guardrails.
Modernity, by contrast, differed markedly, and it did so for a variety of reasons; yet, the substantial difference between the various 'classes' was perhaps best explained by the likes of Marx and his ilk: different, if not outright oppositional, interests, hence the inevitability of civil war ('class struggle', if you like).
Let's not go down to 'post-modernity', for then the entire 'modernistic' critique becomes patently absurd: class struggle, like civil wars, may eventually be resolved. Yet, if everything and anything is about power hierarchies, there's no way out but sectarian violence.
"Ordnung muss sein" is in itself not bad; the essence is only in the reality.
I'd not call the conclusion that violence between groups is an inevitable function of reality post-modern, but realpolitisch. The post-modern aspect is saying no-one group however defined has any more claim to anything than any other group, and that is patently anti-reality (it's even worse than nihilism).
In the absence of ethics, morals et c given by external objective authority (the clergy for the peasant beholden to his landlord say - for the peasant those two is objective authority as the peasant has no other authority to seek recourse with) man-made ethics is all we've got. That they are arbitrary (the relativist's and pomo's favourite dead-stop for debate) does not remove their meaning or their justification for being, since all pre-modern systems (save the french and american ones post-revolution) evolved; they were not consciously developed as an end-all be-all master plan. Hence, what meets the pomo justification for dispensing with notions of things being more than power plays is only the modernism the pomo rejects, not what came before.
The old laws pre-absolute monarchy days here was purely practical. F.e. a man touching a woman and not removing his hand when told by her, if told immediately, had committed a crime and would be fined depending on where he put his hand. The law clearle stated that a woman was to cry out in such an instance, immediately calling it to public attention and shaming the man.
However, if she did not object, and he placed his hand closer and closer to intimate parts, if he then took what was called "the shameful grip" (there's some debate as to what that was exactly) and hse hadn not objected beforehand, she had forfeited her right to objection, having in the eys of the laws and customs egged him on.
Compared to the same law of today and of the 20th century, that more than a thousand year old law put more responsiblity and accountability on both parties.
I bring this up to show as an example of that olden laws and customs were not power plays as far as the free people was concerned; the power play structure, which is real, is a product of city burghers and ruling classes. The people had the forces of nature to compete with and nature does not play power games, it simply is.
Thus, the more refined a society becomes the more it becomes about accumulating power rather than what to do with (apart from using it to accumulate power).
And class struggle is quite easy to resolve. Remove abject poverty, fear of homelessness and starvation and provide basic utilities. That in one fell swoop removes the foundation for radicalising both workers and bourgeois middle-class, burghers and sundry. Unfortunately, that process is what gave rise to the Frankfurt school and we both know how influential its thoughts and methods ("The Long March through the Institutions") has been.
May 21, 2022·edited May 21, 2022Liked by epimetheus
Interesting.
I was positive at the time of Maastricht. But after all Basel 1,2,3... I understood that was just a giant joke: just to open all Eu markets in one go, not to EU citizens but for US corporations too. And the worst was the currency. Whatever the EU Court said it's pretty clear that EU after 20 years was mainly done for financial criminals and bankers, to make it easy to move money and especially dirty money without no one controlling. In fact there is no EU Sec like... even if Sec after 9/11 we all understood was involved in that criminal act, the infamous Building 7 controlled demolition with all Sec documents inside... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqG6v7KZ_s8
So EU Commission or Council are again an operetta set it up for the idiot europeans that watch tv or read the usual media.
When Greece tried to oppose to EU Commission and their tyranny, it was a great lesson on how fake, criminal and planned was and is EU. Again not for European but for Corporations and Bankers whatever nation they are from.
So to me it's time to SHUT DOWN EU and Euro for ever. Europe didn't need it and last 20 years have demonstrated that is completely useless: it didn't avoid the f**king huge american planned crash of 2007/8, it didn't help Greece people. It didn't make my country a better place to live, it made Europe a bad, squalid copy of the United Criminals of America. Never opposing to them for any issue but only giving a couple of ticket to Micropork or Scroogle just to show they're doing something while secretly destroying the diversity, the unique cultural essence and traditions of every single country.
Surely, after a trip I did in Hungary and Czeck Rep. in 2000, I learnt how much money german real estate companies did make or how italians already moved a lot of industries in Romania or Bulgaria for cheap salaries. Again, EU is for business, it's a fake and all those Treaty are just for the people to believe it exist for them (and for lawyers to make even more money).
The problem for those who planned this, is that you'll never unify europeans, because they were happy as they were before EU and they are soo different in too many things.
But, hold on, a solution to solve this ancestral problem there is: A CIVIL WAR!! Like those criminals of americans did to unify it, to make the so called United Criminals of America. Nice idea!
But then we should do as they did: destroy year after year every cultural tradition, language, habits of every country of the newly united EU, make them constantly fear of something, make them constantly need State help, assistance, leadership. Find a foreign enemy, a common one to all europeans, so they raise the Eu flag, they plant it outside their house, they salute those criminals of the Army that leave to fight that enemy... maybe we can attack Andorra? or Taiwan and give it to China that will be grateful for the rest of centuries?... We need to start from a small country of farmers, fishermen... what about Sri Lanka? I mean is like Vietnam, but we will win, we're smarter than those american idiots, no?!
No, no I got a better idea, yep, great idea! What about if the enemy are the Communists?
Virtually the same with me: the economic integration was one thing (even though its pre-1945 roots should be openly discussed), and I'm mildly in favour of it.
The pseudo-political aspects that emerged around the end of the Cold War, though, now that's an entirely different beast. I'm fundamentally opposed to it, for the EU is the doing of a clique of transatlanticist camp followers who 'elected' their own perks and benefits to trump the interests of the peoples they claim to represent.
The Euro was the next nail in the coffin, and it's essentially an instrument of economic warfare by the 'core' (Germany, Austria, Benelux, parts of France) vs. the 'rest' of the EU/EEA. As such, it represents the dominion of 'northern' financial interests against everyone else.
But the problem is legislation. EU Commission or Council is like WHO with health... they rule over states, as you also wrote in that nice example, but if the ruling was related to general things, economic stability and so on, ok it's debatable. But when it comes to food, production quotas and all that bullshit then it's not different from a Tyranny tout court.
But take the last 2 years where a centralized EMA was authorizing all that criminal shit of Gene Therapies, did one EU country opposed to that authorization? No. So EMA is a criminal organization that rule over every Eu state, destroying any human rights.
EU and Euro need to be shot down! along with Nato of course ;)
No arguments here, my friend, esp. the differentiation between 'useful' and 'useless' integration.
I would argue the crucial turning point occurred sometime in the 1980s when the economic integration morphed into the 'ever closer union' agit-prop. Add to that the advances and dissemination of IT-related possibilities since around 2000 (when data storage became so cheap that one could simply keep the data), et voilà: all the data we produce can and is be used to 'predict' human behaviours (as well as fork up kompromat, if needed).
The most disturbing issue is, as you say, that no-one in power said anything in the past 2+ years. I also recall a post by A. Berenson on the EMA's 'wobbling' about 'boosters' sometime in January, so I listened to the EMA technical briefing, only to hear that nothing was to change.
These (EMA) bureaucrats are, in fact, resistant to facts and data, so the question isn't so much whether or not EUroklatura is criminal, but how to get rid of them.
It is also very comforatble arrangement for national governements.
If they want to do something impopular, they either just flat out tell the people it is due to EU demands and rules, or they make their own people in the EU write up such a demand.
If they want to refuse doing something the people want to, they use the same excuse. "We're not allowed to do that because treaty "/&&//()/="¤" forbids it. "
Since you mention feudalism, have you looked at the ur-germanic concept of odal or odalan? I think the closest modern german wrod would be Bauernhof, if mixed with the concept of heimat: your ancestral land, yours by right of blood heritage.
Odal was law in all of Scandinavia not only pre-christianity but until quite recently (and Norway still has odelsrett in its constitutional law). The word is the probable root of adel (noble).
Based on runic inscriptions, land had to be owned as freehold, no debts or similar, for three to six generations for it to count as odal. When it was declared such, it belonged to the bloodline living there, under the hand of the head of the family.
The justification for the strong protection this had may partially have been due to Od being one of the names for Oden. As god of kings, chiefs and headmen it is logical that his name be invoked to seal the justification and legality of a tradition. Sensible, since the blesser of raven's bounty usually got his way sooner or later, being god of death as well.
What has this rambling collection of thoughts to do with the EU emulating the last days of the Roman Republic? Well, whenever this kind of forced top-down unification has occurred, historically it has been the prelude to great wars, civil or otherwise. From Gaius Julius to Gandhi, nationalism-by-blood-and-creed has always been the only way out for the people and those prospective leaders not invited to the circles of power.
What to do about it? That depends on so many factors for the specific case - but not going along and accepting it goes a long way. The greater public will not be roused until they start going hungry. The bourgeoisie will not annoint a saviour until they are threatened with becoming destitute. Any honest student of history knows what patterns revolutions follow. The issue now is, how to ensure the hypothetical Leader promising a brief period of dictatorship to right all wrongs is a Leader aligned with one's own moral and pragmatical inner compass.
Me, I've chosen the Svejk option.
Ha, I had no idea about 'odal', and I shall check this out.
I knew of a number of 'freeholding' considerations, and I wouldn't want the below statement to be misunderstood: despite any number of things that made 'pre-modern' life 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short' (as Hobbes had it), 'feudalism' was a coherent socio-metaphysical outlook, perhaps even a 'system of order', that was remarkably stable.
True, there were ups and downs, and there were many things that made life very hard, too, and while I sure as hell don't want to romanticise it, I'm inclined to believe that this 'stability' was reinforced by (a certain) alignment of values of those who owned the land and those who tilled the soil, typically for them. I other words: peasants and lords shared the same worldview, and while their positions differed (of course, for God-given reasons), they had the same moral guardrails.
Modernity, by contrast, differed markedly, and it did so for a variety of reasons; yet, the substantial difference between the various 'classes' was perhaps best explained by the likes of Marx and his ilk: different, if not outright oppositional, interests, hence the inevitability of civil war ('class struggle', if you like).
Let's not go down to 'post-modernity', for then the entire 'modernistic' critique becomes patently absurd: class struggle, like civil wars, may eventually be resolved. Yet, if everything and anything is about power hierarchies, there's no way out but sectarian violence.
"Ordnung muss sein" is in itself not bad; the essence is only in the reality.
I'd not call the conclusion that violence between groups is an inevitable function of reality post-modern, but realpolitisch. The post-modern aspect is saying no-one group however defined has any more claim to anything than any other group, and that is patently anti-reality (it's even worse than nihilism).
In the absence of ethics, morals et c given by external objective authority (the clergy for the peasant beholden to his landlord say - for the peasant those two is objective authority as the peasant has no other authority to seek recourse with) man-made ethics is all we've got. That they are arbitrary (the relativist's and pomo's favourite dead-stop for debate) does not remove their meaning or their justification for being, since all pre-modern systems (save the french and american ones post-revolution) evolved; they were not consciously developed as an end-all be-all master plan. Hence, what meets the pomo justification for dispensing with notions of things being more than power plays is only the modernism the pomo rejects, not what came before.
The old laws pre-absolute monarchy days here was purely practical. F.e. a man touching a woman and not removing his hand when told by her, if told immediately, had committed a crime and would be fined depending on where he put his hand. The law clearle stated that a woman was to cry out in such an instance, immediately calling it to public attention and shaming the man.
However, if she did not object, and he placed his hand closer and closer to intimate parts, if he then took what was called "the shameful grip" (there's some debate as to what that was exactly) and hse hadn not objected beforehand, she had forfeited her right to objection, having in the eys of the laws and customs egged him on.
Compared to the same law of today and of the 20th century, that more than a thousand year old law put more responsiblity and accountability on both parties.
I bring this up to show as an example of that olden laws and customs were not power plays as far as the free people was concerned; the power play structure, which is real, is a product of city burghers and ruling classes. The people had the forces of nature to compete with and nature does not play power games, it simply is.
Thus, the more refined a society becomes the more it becomes about accumulating power rather than what to do with (apart from using it to accumulate power).
And class struggle is quite easy to resolve. Remove abject poverty, fear of homelessness and starvation and provide basic utilities. That in one fell swoop removes the foundation for radicalising both workers and bourgeois middle-class, burghers and sundry. Unfortunately, that process is what gave rise to the Frankfurt school and we both know how influential its thoughts and methods ("The Long March through the Institutions") has been.
You know the 'old saying': if the world was a unitary state, all wars would be civil wars.
It's perhaps as much a function of numbers (population pressure), economic incentives (hat tip to Marx and Lenin, I suppose), and individual vice.
Interesting.
I was positive at the time of Maastricht. But after all Basel 1,2,3... I understood that was just a giant joke: just to open all Eu markets in one go, not to EU citizens but for US corporations too. And the worst was the currency. Whatever the EU Court said it's pretty clear that EU after 20 years was mainly done for financial criminals and bankers, to make it easy to move money and especially dirty money without no one controlling. In fact there is no EU Sec like... even if Sec after 9/11 we all understood was involved in that criminal act, the infamous Building 7 controlled demolition with all Sec documents inside... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqG6v7KZ_s8
So EU Commission or Council are again an operetta set it up for the idiot europeans that watch tv or read the usual media.
When Greece tried to oppose to EU Commission and their tyranny, it was a great lesson on how fake, criminal and planned was and is EU. Again not for European but for Corporations and Bankers whatever nation they are from.
So to me it's time to SHUT DOWN EU and Euro for ever. Europe didn't need it and last 20 years have demonstrated that is completely useless: it didn't avoid the f**king huge american planned crash of 2007/8, it didn't help Greece people. It didn't make my country a better place to live, it made Europe a bad, squalid copy of the United Criminals of America. Never opposing to them for any issue but only giving a couple of ticket to Micropork or Scroogle just to show they're doing something while secretly destroying the diversity, the unique cultural essence and traditions of every single country.
Surely, after a trip I did in Hungary and Czeck Rep. in 2000, I learnt how much money german real estate companies did make or how italians already moved a lot of industries in Romania or Bulgaria for cheap salaries. Again, EU is for business, it's a fake and all those Treaty are just for the people to believe it exist for them (and for lawyers to make even more money).
The problem for those who planned this, is that you'll never unify europeans, because they were happy as they were before EU and they are soo different in too many things.
But, hold on, a solution to solve this ancestral problem there is: A CIVIL WAR!! Like those criminals of americans did to unify it, to make the so called United Criminals of America. Nice idea!
But then we should do as they did: destroy year after year every cultural tradition, language, habits of every country of the newly united EU, make them constantly fear of something, make them constantly need State help, assistance, leadership. Find a foreign enemy, a common one to all europeans, so they raise the Eu flag, they plant it outside their house, they salute those criminals of the Army that leave to fight that enemy... maybe we can attack Andorra? or Taiwan and give it to China that will be grateful for the rest of centuries?... We need to start from a small country of farmers, fishermen... what about Sri Lanka? I mean is like Vietnam, but we will win, we're smarter than those american idiots, no?!
No, no I got a better idea, yep, great idea! What about if the enemy are the Communists?
Virtually the same with me: the economic integration was one thing (even though its pre-1945 roots should be openly discussed), and I'm mildly in favour of it.
The pseudo-political aspects that emerged around the end of the Cold War, though, now that's an entirely different beast. I'm fundamentally opposed to it, for the EU is the doing of a clique of transatlanticist camp followers who 'elected' their own perks and benefits to trump the interests of the peoples they claim to represent.
The Euro was the next nail in the coffin, and it's essentially an instrument of economic warfare by the 'core' (Germany, Austria, Benelux, parts of France) vs. the 'rest' of the EU/EEA. As such, it represents the dominion of 'northern' financial interests against everyone else.
But the problem is legislation. EU Commission or Council is like WHO with health... they rule over states, as you also wrote in that nice example, but if the ruling was related to general things, economic stability and so on, ok it's debatable. But when it comes to food, production quotas and all that bullshit then it's not different from a Tyranny tout court.
But take the last 2 years where a centralized EMA was authorizing all that criminal shit of Gene Therapies, did one EU country opposed to that authorization? No. So EMA is a criminal organization that rule over every Eu state, destroying any human rights.
EU and Euro need to be shot down! along with Nato of course ;)
No arguments here, my friend, esp. the differentiation between 'useful' and 'useless' integration.
I would argue the crucial turning point occurred sometime in the 1980s when the economic integration morphed into the 'ever closer union' agit-prop. Add to that the advances and dissemination of IT-related possibilities since around 2000 (when data storage became so cheap that one could simply keep the data), et voilà: all the data we produce can and is be used to 'predict' human behaviours (as well as fork up kompromat, if needed).
The most disturbing issue is, as you say, that no-one in power said anything in the past 2+ years. I also recall a post by A. Berenson on the EMA's 'wobbling' about 'boosters' sometime in January, so I listened to the EMA technical briefing, only to hear that nothing was to change.
These (EMA) bureaucrats are, in fact, resistant to facts and data, so the question isn't so much whether or not EUroklatura is criminal, but how to get rid of them.
as French Revolution did... with a lot of guillotine.... I sponsor one if needed! XD
Best ever article recently on US and permanent war: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/no-way-out-but-war
It is also very comforatble arrangement for national governements.
If they want to do something impopular, they either just flat out tell the people it is due to EU demands and rules, or they make their own people in the EU write up such a demand.
If they want to refuse doing something the people want to, they use the same excuse. "We're not allowed to do that because treaty "/&&//()/="¤" forbids it. "
Heads they win, tails we lose.
Until we make them lose their heads, I suppose.