The European Union’s heart of darkness
by josieappleton
The head of the European Union has said that the organisation should ‘lead the discussion’ on ‘mandatory vaccination’.
The first element is genial and sociable: it is a ‘discussion’ about ‘a common approach’. And yet the substance of the issue is brutal: it is the forced injection, against their will, of millions of Europeans.
Behind this statement lies the nature of the political arrangement that exists in the EU.
It is in and through the EU that national political elites affected a retreat from their publics, entering into an elite bureaucratic sphere of common policymaking. In this sphere, policy becomes a question of the administration of populations from above. The question is not what is wanted by people, or what is right, but what is expedient. This intra-elite world becomes the new source of pressure, censure and approval for national leaders, rather than their own publics.
Yet at the same time, there is a faux civic clothing that has been developed to cover the arrangement. Brussels is bristling with rights and civic organisations: there are constant conferences about ‘a soul for Europe’, about building bridges between people, human rights, respect for personal autonomy, understanding differences and diversity. This fine talk is rather like the monarchical trappings that clothed the modern British constitutional state and obfuscate the real operations of power. It is a dressing, a cover, used to disguise the new political arrangement; it serves to give the cold hearted machinations a civic air and democratic trapping.
So nobody should be surprised that those fine-talking European rights organisations are now silent. It is no surprise that those who talked of rights, and dialogue, and the dignity of people, are now silent as Austrians, Germans and Greeks have their Nuremberg rights violated, as the unvaccinated are consigned to their homes and there is a development of new grades of citizen status according to people’s precise medical situation.
The civic robes have been cast off, and the dark heart of the EU political arrangement is being revealed.
Here we see that it is not populism that leads to barbarism – it is elitism, and the elite management of people as if they were things, as if they were objects. The creation of independent bureaucracies turns people into things, their bodies become inert objects to be used and directed by policy. The political elites order people to be vaccinated, then discuss a fund to compensate those who are injured by the vaccination.
Yet the people of Europe are not inert bodies. We are not yet things. European citizens are burning police cars in Rotterdam, taking over Christmas markets in Luxembourg, blocking roads in the French department of Guadalupe, blocking ports in Turin. French towns and cities have had weekly demonstrations since the ‘pass sanitaire’ was imposed in August: every single Saturday, in almost every town, every city.
The French leader of ‘Les Patriotes’, Florian Philippot, is calling for the rebellion against the vaccine pass to be a rebellion against the ‘new oligarchy’, and the EU – towards a world that is ‘more just, more beautiful, more radiant, where the people are respected in their sovereignty, where the people of France can again stand on their feet’.
This points towards a new French revolution, which could lead not only France but also the European continent into a rupture and total disruption of the intra-elite ‘discussion’ – in order to reinstate people as the authors of their own bodies, and the policies of their nation.
Notes on Freedom 