Friday 5 June, 2009

Special Report

By Andrew Halloway

As the EU election votes are counted, a former Soviet dissident who spent twelve years in the Russian gulag says the European Union is heading towards a superstate that operates in a remarkably similar way to the old Soviet Union.

What Russia could not achieve in the Cold War – the defeat of European democracy and nation states – is being achieved in the post-Cold War era, says Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky. And he should know – having had bitter personal experience of the methods of control used by the former Soviet state.

Bukovsky believes the EU is developing a disturbingly similar pattern of ideology and methods, and is warning the people of Europe that they are sleepwalking into totalitarianism.

The author and political activist says in a documentary, Britain on the Brink: “It is really puzzling to me, that having just buried one monster, the Soviet Union, another remarkably similar one, the European Union, is being built. The EU is the old Soviet model presented in Western guise.”

And he claims that the rise of the EU as a political rather than just an economic entity has been masterminded by collusion between Western Europe’s socialists and Russian communists.

Bukovsky, who was a candidate in the Russian presidential election of 2008, says he read politburo and central committee documents in 1992 that confirmed the existence of a conspiracy to turn the EU into a socialist state. Those documents showed “very clearly that the whole idea of turning the Common Market into a federal state was agreed between the left-wing parties of Europe and Moscow.”

At the time, socialists feared that the economic reforms led by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were influencing Europe away from leftist ideologies. The idea of building a socialist superstate, he believes, was introduced to counteract the rising popularity of Thatcherite policies.

About 1985, Bukovsky says, European socialists “came to the conclusion that if they worked together, they would manage to highjack the whole European project and turn it upside down – instead of an open market, into a federal state.”

In his view, the political correctness that has spread through British society did not originate here but has spread from the EU, which is using it as an “intellectual gulag” to suppress opposition. He says it may begin with questions of race, gender and sexual orientation, but it is “the beginning of the gulag… the beginning of your loss of freedom.”

Bukovsky describes the European Parliament as an equivalent of the Supreme Soviet of the former Soviet Union, that merely “rubber stamps” decisions made by a small number of unelected leaders – the European Commissioners, aided and abetted by the Council of Europe (the oldest international organisation working towards European integration, having been founded in 1949, and comprising more member states than the EU).

Bukovsky draws some remarkable parallels between the Soviet Union and the EU. Under communism, people were taught to relinquish their nationalities and cultural identity to form a new soviet entity. The EU is following the same path: eroding national sovereignty and eliminating cultural differences by issuing a myriad of rules that have to be adopted across the EU – all to form a new European entity. We are encouraged to think of ourselves no longer as British or French but Europeans.

Bukovsky warns that, despite its appearance of success, like the Soviet Union, the EU has within its anti-democratic principles the “seeds of its own destruction”.

And just as the Soviet Union fell apart because of its anti-democratic methods, so the EU will collapse, according to Bukovsky – and that could lead to economic and political chaos, even war.

It is no secret that the Lisbon Treaty transfers even more powers to Brussels, and that is being imposed on Europe against the wishes of its people. France, the Netherlands and Ireland have all voted against it, but that decision is not being accepted by the EU leaders. Instead, Ireland is being asked to vote again, and governments like ours are refusing the referendum they promised for fear of another ‘no’ vote. It makes a laughing stock of democracy.

Due to the expenses scandal, everyone is expecting the British to have voted in larger numbers than ever before for smaller parties like UKIP and other anti-Europe parties. I was astonished to find six separate anti-EU parties on my ballot paper for the European elections.

Perhaps we are finally waking up to the danger of a monolithic Europe taking over more and more of our lives.

But until all the people of the EU rise up against the anti-democratic forces of which Bukovsky warns, the pro-EU politicians will continue down the path of creating a federal Eurostate that will mimic the mistakes of the Soviet Union.

Photo: Used with Permission