APS is sorely lacking in Brexit think-pieces. What are we, a bunch of colonial yahoos with not a care for our dentally-challenged cousins across the pond? Or their personal hygiene-challenged neighbors a bit farther east? Not to mention the lot that smells of fermented cabbage beyond them.
Besides, "Brexit" is one of those wonderful words known as a portmanteau. Portmanteau being a French-origin word for a lexicographical mash-up:
British+exit = brexit
Breakfast+Lunch = brunch
baseball+basketball = baseketball
Beef cattle+buffalo = beeffalo
And that is but a few examples beginning with the letter "B."
Anyways, like so many issues, brexit is hung up on core issues that all the Right Thinking People have declared forbidden to speak about.
The Immigration GambitThe British will vote in a referendum on whether to leave the European Union on June 23, but the debate has gotten bogged down because of the limits on respectable opinion. The two allowable views are that Britain should leave because other Europeans are hateful, or that Europe should stay united so it can let in more non-Europeans.
The notion that Europeans might favor each other over outsiders (its founding idea) is today unthinkably racist.
Yet the main problems driving support for Britain exiting are immigration and the English fear that the EU is increasingly a mask for German mastery, hand in glove with Germany’s Great War ally Turkey.
But you aren’t supposed to talk about such matters...
“The truth is that the history of the last couple of thousand years has been broadly repeated attempts by various people or institutions—in a Freudian way—to rediscover the lost childhood of Europe, this golden age of peace and prosperity under the Romans, by trying to unify it. Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically.”
This outraged Remain supporters, since everybody knows the EU is good and Hitler is bad.
Granted, that’s a pretty childish way to think, but the debate over the European Union hasn’t shown much sophistication. Nor has it been terribly relevant to the real issue of the 21st century, which is that Europe will be demographically overwhelmed if it doesn’t develop the self-respect to defend itself.
...you might imagine that British voters would be more concerned about England filling up with Pakistanis than with Poles. After all, Poland might actually improve enough for the Poles to want to go home someday, while nobody expects the Pakistanis to ever make much of Pakistan. And Poles tend to go into plumbing rather than pimping.
But British subjects are allowed to express their opinions of Poles, while speaking freely about Pakistanis can bring a visit from the police...
Of course, Boris’ reference to “Napoleon, Hitler” is a shout-out to the single most consistent foreign policy objective of London over the past half millennium: preventing any single hegemon from dominating the Continent, especially the Low Countries across from the Thames Estuary...
The English won most of these power struggles, which is why I’m writing this essay in distant California in English...
Who is the most plausible would-be Continental hegemon to elicit this instinctual English reaction to practice divide-and-disrupt?...
In reality, the biggest threat to European unity is its dominant figure, Dr. Merkel.
I hope for the Brits' sake they withdraw from the EU. That will also be a test of both Brit and EU legitimacy. If the UK is not allowed to leave, well, we'll know something else about the UK gov't and hte EU, won;t we?
