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| Images from George Orwell’s 1984 manuscript (Part 1): The three slogans of the Party: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength - H/T @OrwellGuy |
Beginning on May 9, "Europe Day", Whitehall must fly the European flag or be fined daily. And under a proposed change due to take effect within the next two years, the flag must fly permanently outside any organisation which manages development funding from Brussels or also face fines for non-compliance.
Civil servants advised Mr Pickles what the plan means: 1,000 bodies, including Cambridge University, Jamie Oliver’s 15 restaurants in Cornwall and The Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, known as the 'home of snooker' must fly the yellow star spangled azure. Mr Pickles hit back: "(...) Will forcing people to fly the flag help balance the EU budget? I don’t think so". The Minister was joined by Chris Heaton-Harris, Tory MP for Daventry: "(...) This symbolises much of what is wrong in the EU – using propaganda tactics to prove they have influence over people. It is completely unacceptable and this idea should be dumped".
The new rules also demand that organisations should give "the widest possible media coverage" to any activities funded by BRX, and describe what is being done with the money in an EU language other than English. During the past five years the Commission has doled out fines worth thousands of pounds to dozens of British organisations for failing to display the EU’s branding instructions.
This latest petty oukaze has Roger Kimball on PJM enquiring whether this will be the straw that broke the camel’s back? Or will it be Britain’s Stamp Act: an incident that, though trivial in itself, rouses the people from their dogmatic slumbers and incites them to rise up and throw off the chains of tyranny?
Does “chains of tyranny” sound a bit melodramatic, a bit extreme or exaggerated, for the reign of Brussels? Think again. “Tyranny” can be mild as well as harsh. (...) A tyrannical rule is an arbitrary rule. And what could be more arbitrary than the rule-by-elites that is the dispensation known as the European?
Ayn Rand: A dictatorship has to be capricious; it has to rule by means of the unexpected., the incomprehensible, the wantonly irrational; it has to deal not in death, but in sudden death; a state of chronic uncertainty is what men are psychologically unable to bear". [1] Such as turning people into criminals for violating unknown laws?
Kimball quotes Edmund Burke in Thoughts of the Cause of Our Present Discontents, a classic in the library of anti-totalitarian reflection:
"It is the nature of despotism to abhor power held by any means but its own momentary pleasure; and to annihilate all intermediate situations between boundless strength on its own part, and total debility on the part of the people". (...) It is all part of what I have described elsewhere as “the new Gleichschaltung,” the effort to “harmonize” or bring into conformity laws, customs, and behavior all over Europe. “Of course,” I noted, “this is not the first time that Europe has attempted to “harmonize” its laws. Beginning in 1933, there was a concerted effort to ‘harmonize’ not only the laws but also all of social life. The German word for the process was Gleichschaltung. That time the effort came out of Berlin. (...)"I leave you to reflect on this with a report, also courtesy of Mail Online: "Crisis, what economic crisis? Anger after £10m private jet deal to fly Eurocrat chiefs to engagements". Some might remember the poverty and the bread lines across the Warsaw Pact while its party apparatchiks had the broad empty lanes to themselves and the latest model of Mercedes Benz.
[1] "The Voice of Reason, essays in Objectivist thought", by Ayn Rand, "Antitrust: The Rule of Unreason" p. 254, Meridian 1989