It is pure rot, of course. The elites are pretending that the public is bloodthirsty and that only erasing democracy in a smothering European bureaucracy can prevent future bloodshed.
Imagine that, the Europeans looked to their past, noticed that the rulers of Europe often rallied their publics into repeated wars against each other and the rest of the world, and concluded that the key failure in this is their own public that failed to stop the leaders! Never mind that it was the leadership that led Europe to fight. I just want to know how putting an elite that has been prone to war back in complete charge will end European wars? Isn't this recreating the Europe of divine right rulers that created the bloody swath that Europeans cut across the globe?
Mark Steyn, too, is skeptical of the argument that the enlightened EU elites must keep the bloodthirsty masses under their Gucci heels to keep them from killing again:
Why does so much of the continental governing class carry on like the sinister Mitteleuropean shrink from a 1940s melodrama, insisting that you're far too unstable to be allowed to leave the sanatorium? Well, either they're the loopy ones or they're desperate, and they'd rather talk about a new Holocaust than any of the more pressing questions - Turkey, the unsustainable euro, unemployment, over-regulation, deathbed demographics. Or maybe they talk about the Second World War because that's the only genuine pan-European topic.
Whatever the answer, the concentration-camps-around-the-corner argument is at least a useful glimpse into how the Eurocrats regard the citizenry. However the French and Dutch votes go, it seems unlikely that the EU's rulers will allow anything as footling as the will of the people to derail the project at this late stage. In Euro-referendums, there's only one correct answer; it's just that sometimes you have to have two votes before the people figure out which one it is. My sense is that the French will vote narrowly for the constitution and the Dutch will narrowly reject it, but either way the EU will figure out a way to inflict it on the Continent. A stitch-up in time saves, nein?
As we push democracy in the Moslem world and in the former Soviet Union's empire, we can't just assume that Europe is in the 'win' column. If the European Union becomes a single political entity, one day we will need a democracy project for Europe. And given the record of European elites, it could be a bloody project to implement.
We must work to stop the EU. Europeans can be our friends. Europe cannot. It will be bad for us and bad for Europeans if the Brussels bureaucrats gain power. Certainly, with the close calls that voting is providing for the EU, the EU won't make the mistake of letting that go on for long. I mean, when only the best and brightest in Brussels stands between peace and a populist-led holocaust, suppressing freedom will be a blessing, right?
