Europhobia and Where it's Taking Us


Alf Garnett: Patron Saint of Britain's Europhobes and Bigots

This essay was written as a counterblast at the Europhobes on the UK 911 Truth Forum.

As I've been away from this thread whilst dealing with the Europe issue elsewhere, I thought it would be a good idea to summarise what has been going on.

It started with my publishing the European Left's Athens Declaration in order that forum readers could be given an insight into an alternative Europe which they would otherwise miss given the totally distorted, black-and-white caricatures they are presented here by the Europhobes and the UK's tabloid mainstream media (MSM) from where they mainly seem to get their information.

Far from being a monolith, 'Europe' as it is labelled by the Europhobes is a conglomerate of nation states, cultures and languages where folk go about their lives, organising themselves into interest and pressure groups as they do everywhere. The European Left is just one of these, bringing in many of the Left parties throughout continental Europe. Significantly, there is no representation from the UK which suggests a lack of interest in things Continental by what remains of the UK Left.

Europhobia in Britain is not just a thing of the Right and its raggle-tag hangers-on. It goes right across the political spectrum and as an old UK-watcher I have often suggested in past columns in this forum that the malaise has resulted from centuries of imperialist brain-washing to which our population has been subjected by its ruling classes. The myth of the "freeborn Englishman", in particular, has a lot to answer for and this falsehood, of course, ran in parallel with the belligerent, jingoistic idea that Britannia ruled the waves and could simply do no wrong wherever her soldiers and missionaries went. The world was her oyster, there to plunder and rape at her pleasure.

But British hypocrisy couldn't behave in this barbaric manner without a cover. And together with Britain's Anglo-Saxon descendants busily wiping-out the Native Americans while calling it their "Manifest Destiny" to do so, Britain's savagery abroad was quickly and self-righteously justified by Rudyard Kipling's pompous concept of the "White Man's Burden".

It took a Polish writer like Joseph Conrad to show up the White Man's Burden for what it really was, exposing the descent into savagery of the all-powerful white man who found himself suddenly free and a long way away from the restraints of social and legal control deep in the Congo.

Conrad's Congo was, of course, the Belgian Congo but the message was the same, given in the protagonist's last words before his own death: "Exterminate the brutes!"

Those three words, "Exterminate the brutes!", neatly sum up the colonial past of the white man everywhere. And behind the cant and hypocrisy of British Victorian imperialism it was to be found alive and well there.

"Exterminate the Brutes" was the policy used by Britain after the Indian Mutiny where the Indians, particularly Muslims, were terrorized into centuries of subjection. Curiously enough, a similar terrorizing of Muslims is still being practised by the British state which has neatly immunised itself from race laws by using the police and judiciary to bring about a regime of political terror against Muslims under the guise of a spurious 'War on Terror', a nice Orwellian twist.

Racist by nature, Britain's rulers have long practised rule-by-terror. It was also used against the 'Black Irish' and the Gaelic-speaking Highlanders who, after the defeat of the Battle of Culloden, were subjected to the most unspeakable crimes by Butcher Cumberland's redcoats. Gaelic was forbidden and anyone caught speaking it would have their tongues ripped out. If not exterminate then rip out their tongues, teach them who their rulers are and learn 'em hard!

Exterminate the Brutes was practised by the British Army which shot down innocent Irish Folk on Bloody Sunday but thirty years ago. It led to the rape and torture of black Kenyans by British Tommies during the manufactured Mau-Mau uprising in the 'fifties. It was used by the British rulers of the Punjab in WWII when 4 million Indians died in a famine that was entirely preventable but was allowed to happen by the Raj. It is seen once again in the cover-ups going on by the British Army of the atrocities its soldiers have and are committing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The violent, pathological nature of Britain's ruling classes was stirred-up once more by gangsters like Bush Jr and Cheney and the killing goes on.

Racist attitudes thrive in contemporary Britain, on the one hand when it rears its ugly head in the persecution of Muslims by the police and legal system and on the other in the mass slaughter of innocent Iraqis and Afghanis by both the British and their Anglo-Saxon Alliance US counterparts. It's there on the streets as well.

The violence and bigotry never went away with the end of Britain's colonial era. It's still there, well-embedded into the British psyche, waiting to pop out again like a ghoulish jack-in-the-box.

It is against this background that I see Britain's current epidemic of Europhobia. For that Europhobia is just another facet of the pathological mind which now sees Britain somehow under threat of "imposed values" from the European Union as well as from the immigration of 'hordes of East Europeans'.

The idea has been spread that somehow the Commissioners in Brussels are tinkering not just with our laws but with our actual culture! Britain is under threat! Light the beacons and prepare to take on a new Armada!

Well it must be true because that's what the Brits are being told in their favourite newspapers, especially in Rupert Murdoch's SUN and the erstwhile Hitler-and-Mussolini-worshipping DAILY MAIL. The fact that Murdoch is an ardent supporter of the gangster Bushco outfit and US global imperialism is never allowed to stray into the minds of the lumpen masses, given their daily dose of brainwashing bilge in a comic-book form, reading-age seven.

A wonderful thing, dumbing down.

Similarly on the TV where, as John Pilger observes, news reportage is now not so much a case of reporting the news with any attempt towards objectivity but about entertainment. Entertainment. The news is there to entertain you and me, not to inform or to encourage one to think. It's a kind of ghastly, horror-story version of Page Three boobs and bums. The real death and carnage is sanitised and kept off our screens in the same way that Samantha Fox's extremities were airbrushed and the pubic hair in girlie magazines neatly trimmed and clipped with every hair in place. Reality is a plastic bubble in which we all live, The BBC's news-readers are invariably giggling, blonde dolly birds who appear to be retarded teenagers and often most probably have their mental age.

In a dumbed-down society that has been deliberately created to keep us all dumb and under control, it's not surprising to read the dumb views of Europhobes on this forum who clearly have got their information from closet-fascist rags like the DAILY MAIL or the SUN or from their closet-fascist political groups like UKIP and its extremist hangers-on. These same Europhobes present themselves in their talking-shop here as fighters for freedom, banging the 911 drum as it were sufficient to provide their credentials, show just how liberationist they are when in fact, by having allowed themselves to be duped by the latter-day imperialists of the Right, they have become, in effect, part of the problem of the slide into a domestically-produced totalitarian, police state that Britain is experiencing.

Blissfully ignoring the real threats to our freedom they, with a lot of help from the gutter press they read, have found a nice scapegoat to blame all their troubles on. Whilst it would be politically incorrect to blame it on blacks it's ok simply to turn a blind eye on the racist persecution of Muslims by the very institutions they protest are now under threat from Brussels. While grumbling about the threat to Corpus Juris they are quite happy to turn their backs on the actual corpses resulting from the killing and torturing going on by British Tommies, the 8 million dead in Iraq and Afghanistan since 1991 when successive British governments committed a series of war-crimes across the world.

All this is largely ignored by the Europhobes who go on banging their xenophobic drums in an infantile manner. It's all the fault of "Europe", that's who threatens the free-born Englishman. So let's project our terminal state of extreme denial onto this scape-goat. They are the threat, not us!

The Australian idea of the whingeing Brit came about by no accident. It really happened in Australia in the early 'fifties when there was an awful lot of complaining by British immigrants that Oz wasn't after all the Land of Milk and Honey they'd been told about when they bought their £10 tickets at Australia House in London. Whingeing is a national past-time.

But it's not just whingeing, it's scape-goating. And that's what's really frightening. British public opinion --quite often reflected in this Forum in all its bigotry-- has been manipulated by the Murdochracies in a cold and calculated way into seeing "Europe" as its enemy. The purpose is very clear: to use the emotional, blood-tie and language connection to draw the Brits away from Europe and into the arms of the global imperialists in Washington DC in an infernal Anglo-Saxon Alliance where pan-Atlantic capital can fight out its last stand against a changing world where Anglo-American imperialism is in its death throes. That is what the Washington quislings mean when they say that we live in a very dangerous world. What they omit to mention is that when their system of global domination is under threat the danger comes from them. "Shared values" indeed.

The Anglo-Saxon Alliance has little place for a European Union which is seen as a potential threat to it. Consequently, US policy is to divide and rule the EU by splitting it into a "new" and "old" Europe where hard-line capitalist East Europeans like the Czech, Vaclav Klaus, and his Polish counterparts can be used to undermine the social-democrats of the "old" Europe in the west. This is happening as I write and it is very disturbing to see that the British Europhobes on this forum seem quite happy to go to bed with these reactionaries in their war against Brussels.

Ill-informed as they are, the Europhobes just haven't thought things out. They haven't done their homework. Among the general public this wouldn't at all surprise me but on a 911 Truth Forum it becomes a cause for deep concern.

There is a frightening paradox here that whilst on the one hand these champions of British freedom are quite happy to ally themselves with the xenophobes and racists of the extreme right they are hugely undermining their own purported hostility to USUK intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan and the belligerent imperialism of NATO.

By the way, I am here making an assumption that most 911 Truthers are aware of the connection between the events of 911 and USUK globalist militarism and that the heart of the problem they face lies with US imperialism and the neo-fascism of the Bushco/Brown 'special relationship'.

This is basic stuff that any 911 Truther would be expected to understand. But how many of them -especially the Europhobic variety- realise that by continuing, as they do, to oppose a confederated United States of Europe and a common European Defence Force, they are actually aligning themselves with the extremist hawks of US imperialism?

See:

Czech President Warns Against “Europeanism”

Former Soviet Dissident Warns For EU Dictatorship

Don't believe me? Then read this article by a virulently anti-EU writer from the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation, an extreme-right hawkish foundation which, alongside the now-defunct Congress for Cultural Freedom, has for decades acted as a think-tank for US hard-liners.

These people can see the danger posed to US imperialism by the growth of a unified Europe and its Defence Force. The article also recognises the divisive role that up until now Britain has played in preventing that unification from happening. It recognizes the 'special' bilateral interests between US and UK capitalism and observes how important it is that US relations with European member states should remain bilateral rather than having to deal with a less-friendly Brussels.

"Britain has found its strongest, most enduring alliance in its Special Relationship with the United States. The common political, diplomatic, historical, and cultural values shared between Americans and Britons are deep and strong. Further still, Britain and America are prepared to defend these values--with military force if necessary. Common values are meaningful only if both parties are ready to defend them."

Well, we've seen what the USUK Alliance has done in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, are the Europhobes for or against the continuance of this murderous alliance? If they are, as I would hope, against it then are they prepared to leave their prejudices aside and see that the only way Britain's dirty game with Washington can be put at an end is by its being superseded by a European Defence Policy which has nothing or little to do with US interests?

The Europhobes should read the abovementioned document carefully before asking themselves how possibly they could have been so seriously misled by those who while spouting empty talk of freedoms were actually grooming them to join a campaign to divide Europe against itself so that USUK imperialism could remain the bully on the block?

UKIP and the oft-quoted Brussels Journal are just two of the reactionary organisations to be found in this meeting-ground of right-wingers, racists, Islamophobes & their ilk. Consciously or unconsciously our Europhobic friends end up promoting their poisonous views and helping to perpetuate US imperialism.

Europhobia, as we find it, is therefore not just a reactionary thing in itself with its roots in bigotry and a post-imperialist sense of false superiority. It is a major factor in fuelling, and a symptom of, the conditions which are helping to bring about a 21st Century fascist, police state in Britain. A fascist state imported from Washington DC. Instead of thinking to join forces with progressives throughout Europe and elsewhere, Europhobia is an entirely negative poison which is crippling and killing the British psyche.

It has to be challenged and dealt with now. We make our own destiny. Now it is up to us to choose what that destiny is to be.