[5] News from Absurdistan - Pretending To Fight for Ideals We Do Not Have

Democracy - as we know it - between fine print and bombs:

Politicians are trying to sneak the EU-constitution past the people. If they need to do that, you can tell that such a "constitution" is the very opposite of what a constitution is supposed to be: a means to limit the powers of government.

Angela Merkel has German soldiers risking their lives in Afghanistan to bring democracy to the country, while doing her very best to strengthen the undemocratic regime in Brussels that has largely replaced a meaningful parliamentarian democracy in Germany.

"Merkel stages a coup d'état in the fine print

The resolution agreed yesterday in Brussels by the European Council on the EU's proposed constitutional treaty represented an extraordinary coup d'etat, unprecedented in the history of the "European project". To understand the awesome significance of what happened it is necessary to appreciate just how this weekend's decision marked a complete departure from all the normal rules which govern the agreement of such treaties.

All the previous treaties extending the powers of the body now known as the European Union, from Rome through Maastricht to Nice, have been preceded by what is called an "inter-governmental conference" (IGC), a process of negotiation lasting several months between the governments involved. Under the rules of the Vienna Convention governing international treaties, the participants in an IGC have acted as sovereign governments in their own right, free to agree, on a basis of unanimity, which further powers they were prepared to hand over to the supranational government of the EU.

On this occasion, to secure the new treaty they are all so desperately keen to see in place, there will still have to be an IGC, as the rules require. But what is wholly new about yesterday's resolution is that, for the first time, the European Council has given an "exclusive mandate" to all the governments involved that they can only be permitted to discuss the treaty the European Council wants. In other words, they are no longer allowed to act as sovereign governments, as the international rules on treaties require, but can only act under the orders given them by the European Council.

This may sound like a typically arcane nicety of EU procedure, but it is of huge significance. The European Council is itself a "Community institution". It is therefore ordering the sovereign governments to hand over more powers to itself. This is something which, until it so dramatically changed the rules yesterday, no one would have thought the Council had the power to do.

We are thus to be presented with the constitution it wants, without any further opportunity for it to be amended. But, unless they decide to change the rules yet again, it will still have to be ratified by all 27 member states, several of which will need to hold referendums. Mrs Merkel's clever coup d'etat is not yet quite complete."

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/06/24/nbook124.xml

Judging by the rhetoric of the politically correct, you would think the Germans are up in arms against the destruction of democracy, but no: most people think we are doing a humanitarian job in Afghanistan and compliantly suppose the European bureaucracy is a government more efficacious than its domestic precursor.

Hauptsache, wir werden regiert - main thing, we are being governed.

One ambition of my blog is to explain how the hollowness and contradictory nature of the current political creed prevailing in the West is bound to disarm the people intellectually, deaden or train them to accept the powers that be, thus dragging us further down the path toward a tyrannical state.

As for Afghanistan, try this: " NATO and US-led troops are failing to co-ordinate with their Afghan allies and thereby causing civilian deaths, President Hamid Karzai has said. He criticised his Western allies’ “extreme” use of force and said they should act as his government asked. “Innocent people are becoming victims of reckless operations” because the troops had ignored Afghan advice for years, Mr Karzai told reporters. He was speaking after a week in which up to 90 Afghan civilians were killed." -Common Dreams News Center. For the full article see: (http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/23/2047)

If an all-out supporter of Western military interference in the internal affairs of Afghanistan is as discontent as this, one wonders just how popular the Promethean warriors for democracy are in other circles of the invaded country.

Democracy is a precious good, but it is bound to be turned into an evil instrument unless rooted in coherent and firmly observed principles.