Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, 'n Guns blog,
It’s no secret at this point that the EU is an anti-democratic organization. The leadership isn’t elected, but selected from a pre-determined pool of candidates from within the Party structure.
Everyone with the power to make a decision was placed there not by popular vote but by backroom collusion.
As we approach this weekend’s Italian elections there is real despair in the air that there is any light out of this dark time. That no matter what decisions we try to make, they are only in service of those that seek total dominion.
And yet all you hear from these Eurocrats is that we are in a “war of Democracy versus Autocracy,” as EU Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen put it in her hellish EU state of the union address to the European Parliament recently.
Cloaking herself in the inverse of the EU flag’s colors to show solidarity with another anti-democratic regime, Ukraine, Von der Leyen and her merry tribe of vandals in Brussels cast themselves as the protectors of the sacred right of a ‘democracy’ they deny to anyone who disagrees with her.
The same can be said for nearly every major government in Europe. Every time an ‘election’ rolls around the local system is gamed to ensure a particular outcome. The political establishment always coalesces around maintaining the status quo, freezing out any possibility of an ‘unworkable’ or ‘representative’ coalition.
Any outcome they can’t overcome that lies outside the scope of the EU’s values is either laden with poison pills, immediately put under pressure by the EU’s Byzantine rules, and eventually forced out of office.
There is no better example of this anti-democratic structure made flesh than Italy.
For more than a decade Italians have been saddled with mostly-unelected technocratic governments who, at best, stymie any populist/sovereigntist impulses within Italy’s electorate or, at worst, advance the EU’s centralization agenda under the false rubrics of Climate Change and “European Values.”
European Values is a phrase that is synonymous with the phrase “rules-based order.” We make the rules, they say, and you abide by them. We’re allowed to break those rules because 1) we can and 2) we are the goodies.
So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that as the Italians go to the polls this weekend with the center-right coalition led by the Brothers of Italy (FdI) likely to win a major, uncontestable victory, the unelected, openly totalitarian President of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, openly threaten Italians to ‘vote right’ or face her wrath.
Corrupted unelected bureacurat Von der Leyen threatens the Italians: “We will see the result of the vote in Italy. If things go in a difficult direction, we have tools, as in the case of Poland and Hungary.” This is called meddling in elections VDL
Originally tweeted by AZ (@AZmilitary1) on September 23, 2022.
I’ll be honest. Seeing that threat issued towards inherently disagreeable Italians coming from a German bureaucrat will not go as she thinks it will.
When you run out of the power to persuade people the only things left is threats (no matter how empty) and subterfuge. Italy has been trended towards this moment for over a decade and to this point subterfuge has worked particularly well for the EU.
Now it’s down to open threats and ‘consequences.’
Ask Hungary about those ‘consequences.’ The EU parliament this week exercised its only real power, wagging their finger sternly at a member who doesn’t represent the majority’s conception of ‘European Values’ by declaring the democratically-elected (by a landslide) government of Viktor Orban is ‘not a democracy.’
Orwell’s O’Brien would be proud.
This declaration means they have the ability to withhold shared EU development funds from Hungary.
This is called ‘blackmail’ in common parlance.
Moments like this always invoke the great Lew Rockwell reminding us that the government engages in behavior decent people would be ashamed of. It’s more of the “rules-based order” I keep hearing so much about, I guess.
The rough translation to all of these issues is “rules for me and not for thee,” the very essence of San Francis’ description of anarcho-tyranny. The EU is truly an anarcho-tyrannical State where words only have the meanings they decide they have.
And definitions are malleable.
The goal is to pervert the meanings of words to destroy any concept of meaning itself. Doing that unmoors us from our beliefs, seeing only them as the arbiters of truth.
Orwell tried to warn us about this 74 years ago. Moreover, it’s the mechanism by which to subvert our common bonds as people and replace them with the State.
Dexter White, writing for this month’s Gold Goats ‘n Guns Newsletter, covered this subverting the sacred and turning it into the profane, originally defined as “of this world” as an antipode to the sacred, while discussing Biden’s Reichstag Fire speech at Independence Hall:
To make something of this world, you must remove it from the realm of the sacred and make it profane. We used to reserve the sacred to the temple.
The goal of the left is to deny the sanctum, in total. The only ideas allowed are the profane ones, even while they are described in sacred language.
This transition, the act of sacralizing the profanities, is deliberate. It’s what George Orwell was getting at with the concept of newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The sacred is displaced, in its entirety, by the profane, to the point that it can no longer be spoken of because we no longer have the words to do so.
DEXTER K. WHITE, “WELCOME TO THE PROFANUM,” ISSUE 61 GGNG NEWSLETTER
So, rights, which are supposed to be sacred and inviolate are now equated with ‘democracy,’ a purely terrestrial concept, the very essence of the profane. We can only have rights the ‘democracy’ grants us, rather than those rights being inherent in our individuality or given to us by God.
To continue exercising our rights means submitting to the whim of the majority, their immediate needs. This is that typical appeal to the ‘common good’ and all those other Star Trek/Marvel level platitudes that are shoved down our throat by the purveyors of the profane (and the obscene) in Hollywood.
Any celebration of the sacred is to be met with brutal denunciation. The gatekeepers of the profane in the media — critics, columnists and talk-show hosts — are all hyper-aware of these threats. They perform their role as gatekeepers almost unconsciously.
In mythological terms the gargoyle guards the entrance to the temple, the profane that guards the sacred at the cost of his own humanity. Biden defiled the Marine corps having them at his speech, itself a desecration of the location.
It should be considered an unforgiveable offense.
That’s where media enforcement comes in, through amplification of one side and the censorship of the other. It’s why a hundred people fleeing Russia’s mobilization order makes the news but the thousands standing in line at military registration centers do not.
Hungary’s sin was voiced eloquently by Balazs Hidveghi, MEP for Hungary, after the recent vote to strip them of their ‘democracy’ status.
“They are simply unable to accept the fact that the people of Hungary have elected a Conservative government for the fourth time in a row,” the politician argued. “A government that dares to defend its nation’s interests, one that stands in the way of the extreme left’s ideology.
“That is the real ‘sin’ of Hungary, and that is why all these unfounded lies are coming from the left,”
And it is a sin in the minds of the Von der Leyens of the world for the EU represents their new temple, the apotheosis of their mad quest to finally make Communism work.
It’s also a sincere sin that Orban refuses to subordinate Hungary’s Christian morals and values to those “European Values” held so sacred by Von der Leyen. If you weren’t paying attention the Orthodox Patriarch of Serbia presented Orban with its highest honor recently.
On September 5, Patriarch Porfirije presented Orbán with the gold degree of the Order of Saint Sava, which is the highest decoration awarded by the Serbian Church. The ceremony took place at the Carmelite Monastery in Budapest, the current seat of Hungary’s prime ministers.
The news would not, perhaps, be worthy of special note were it not for the Patriarch’s speech justifying the award and Orbán’s response. Both addresses summarize the malaise of today’s Europe. Both represent a welcome example of solidarity and unity among Christian believers belonging to different traditions (Orbán is a Protestant at the helm of a mostly Roman Catholic nation). Both are therefore worth bringing in translation to our readers, as no other outlet in the Western world will do so.
As Srdja Trifkovic put it, this move sees both men as ‘lights in a dark world.’
Von der Leyen’s threat to Italy is the same move just made against Hungary, “Vote the right way, or you will lose the EU’s support.” The problem with that threat, however, is that Italy is not Hungary.
Hungary is a state the EU wants to have fully under its control. Crushing its nationalism and cultural identity is necessary to keep the other Eastern European countries in line and to project a united front, one supernation under NATO, indivisible, with liberty and justice defined for all.
That said, the EU doesn’t need Hungary to survive. But neither can it be allowed to oppose the majority, lest it undermine their authority. That mouse cannot be allowed to roar.
So, not only will Hungary lose its status, because it has exercised its right of refusal to go along with Commissar Von der Leyen’s policies on sanctioning Russia, the EU is now finding that “European Values” no longer require unanimous consent.
The push is on to reform the EU charter to remove each country’s veto power over taxes and foreign policy.
On the other hand, Italy is the second-biggest economy in the EU. It represents the third leg of the tripod on which the entire European Project is built.
So, while the EU wants Hungary crushed to keep Eastern Europe in line and push through its new ‘democratic’ reforms, it needs Italy or the whole EU collapses.
And at that point I have to remind Ms. Von der Lyin’ of the oldest adage in banking.
When you owe the bank $1000 it’s your problem.
When you owe the bank a trillion dollars, it’s the bank’s problem.
And that’s where we are today. Italy’s debt problems thanks to the EU’s mad insistence of keeping control over Italy’s political system are far worse today than they were in 2011 when Silvio Berlusconi was ousted and technocrat Mario Monti was installed.
Mario Draghi only compounded the problem taking the ECB and all of Europe to negative interest rates for nearly a decade. Christine Lagarde was brought in to keep the ball rolling while Draghi was installed to ensure Italy was hog-tied to the EU Commission through COVID relief funds, a bill that Draghi was not able to get passed.
Today Italy’s TARGET2 liabilities are the EU’s liabilities. There is no mechanism to pay them back. There is only default, hyperinflation or both. The leaders of the center-right coalition about to take power in Italy have to realize their leverage in this situation.
Because it is immense and it renders every syllable of Von der Lyin’s threat as hollow and devoid of substance as the power she ultimately thinks she exercises.
And that brings us to the market meltdown we saw after the Fed raised interest rates in the US again by 0.75% on the eve of Italy’s elections and the referenda of four Ukrainian Oblasts to decide who they want to be ruled by, Russia or Ukraine.
The choice for them is simple. The corruption of what they are voting for is meant to complicate that decision.
Every day brings another note about the manufactured energy crisis in Europe using ‘punishing the autocrat Putin’ excuse to cover their real intentions, nationalization of major industries, wholesale debt default and centralization of power across the continent to the EU.
And if it means doing away with functioning capital markets and the middle class that sustains them, then so be it. It’s for the common good, after all.
Another tranche of people finally hit the ‘acceptance’ phase of the Kubler-Ross model on the death of the “Fed Put” and the lie that Europe’s problems are solvable this week. They looked at their portfolios and, waking up from a long, lost weekend at Bernie’s, hit the sell button.
Repeatedly.
Sadly, there are still too many people in ‘denial’ and ‘bargaining’ to really catalyze the revolt against these revolting Eurocrats.
The rush into the US dollar has only just begun. Whatever happens in Italy and Ukraine this weekend will have profound effects on the future of the West.
At the climax of Matt Reeves’ The Batman, Bruce leads the fallen people of Gotham out of the darkness of a biblical flood brought on by the city’s sins to an uncertain future, vowing to finally embrace that role to guard what’s left while the city rebuilds.
I don’t know what Europe will turn into over the next few months, but the one thing we can safely say is that it won’t be a triumph of ‘democracy.’ ‘European values,’ on the other hand, will have been properly defined as the obscenity they truly have become.
* * *
Join my Patreon if you like swearing at autocrats.
Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,
It’s no secret at this point that the EU is an anti-democratic organization. The leadership isn’t elected, but selected from a pre-determined pool of candidates from within the Party structure.
Everyone with the power to make a decision was placed there not by popular vote but by backroom collusion.
As we approach this weekend’s Italian elections there is real despair in the air that there is any light out of this dark time. That no matter what decisions we try to make, they are only in service of those that seek total dominion.
And yet all you hear from these Eurocrats is that we are in a “war of Democracy versus Autocracy,” as EU Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen put it in her hellish EU state of the union address to the European Parliament recently.
Cloaking herself in the inverse of the EU flag’s colors to show solidarity with another anti-democratic regime, Ukraine, Von der Leyen and her merry tribe of vandals in Brussels cast themselves as the protectors of the sacred right of a ‘democracy’ they deny to anyone who disagrees with her.
The same can be said for nearly every major government in Europe. Every time an ‘election’ rolls around the local system is gamed to ensure a particular outcome. The political establishment always coalesces around maintaining the status quo, freezing out any possibility of an ‘unworkable’ or ‘representative’ coalition.
Any outcome they can’t overcome that lies outside the scope of the EU’s values is either laden with poison pills, immediately put under pressure by the EU’s Byzantine rules, and eventually forced out of office.
There is no better example of this anti-democratic structure made flesh than Italy.
For more than a decade Italians have been saddled with mostly-unelected technocratic governments who, at best, stymie any populist/sovereigntist impulses within Italy’s electorate or, at worst, advance the EU’s centralization agenda under the false rubrics of Climate Change and “European Values.”
European Values is a phrase that is synonymous with the phrase “rules-based order.” We make the rules, they say, and you abide by them. We’re allowed to break those rules because 1) we can and 2) we are the goodies.
So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that as the Italians go to the polls this weekend with the center-right coalition led by the Brothers of Italy (FdI) likely to win a major, uncontestable victory, the unelected, openly totalitarian President of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, openly threaten Italians to ‘vote right’ or face her wrath.
Corrupted unelected bureacurat Von der Leyen threatens the Italians: “We will see the result of the vote in Italy. If things go in a difficult direction, we have tools, as in the case of Poland and Hungary.” This is called meddling in elections VDL
Originally tweeted by AZ (@AZmilitary1) on September 23, 2022.
I’ll be honest. Seeing that threat issued towards inherently disagreeable Italians coming from a German bureaucrat will not go as she thinks it will.
When you run out of the power to persuade people the only things left is threats (no matter how empty) and subterfuge. Italy has been trended towards this moment for over a decade and to this point subterfuge has worked particularly well for the EU.
Now it’s down to open threats and ‘consequences.’
Ask Hungary about those ‘consequences.’ The EU parliament this week exercised its only real power, wagging their finger sternly at a member who doesn’t represent the majority’s conception of ‘European Values’ by declaring the democratically-elected (by a landslide) government of Viktor Orban is ‘not a democracy.’
Orwell’s O’Brien would be proud.
This declaration means they have the ability to withhold shared EU development funds from Hungary.
This is called ‘blackmail’ in common parlance.
Moments like this always invoke the great Lew Rockwell reminding us that the government engages in behavior decent people would be ashamed of. It’s more of the “rules-based order” I keep hearing so much about, I guess.
The rough translation to all of these issues is “rules for me and not for thee,” the very essence of San Francis’ description of anarcho-tyranny. The EU is truly an anarcho-tyrannical State where words only have the meanings they decide they have.
And definitions are malleable.
The goal is to pervert the meanings of words to destroy any concept of meaning itself. Doing that unmoors us from our beliefs, seeing only them as the arbiters of truth.
Orwell tried to warn us about this 74 years ago. Moreover, it’s the mechanism by which to subvert our common bonds as people and replace them with the State.
Dexter White, writing for this month’s Gold Goats ‘n Guns Newsletter, covered this subverting the sacred and turning it into the profane, originally defined as “of this world” as an antipode to the sacred, while discussing Biden’s Reichstag Fire speech at Independence Hall:
To make something of this world, you must remove it from the realm of the sacred and make it profane. We used to reserve the sacred to the temple.
The goal of the left is to deny the sanctum, in total. The only ideas allowed are the profane ones, even while they are described in sacred language.
This transition, the act of sacralizing the profanities, is deliberate. It’s what George Orwell was getting at with the concept of newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The sacred is displaced, in its entirety, by the profane, to the point that it can no longer be spoken of because we no longer have the words to do so.
DEXTER K. WHITE, “WELCOME TO THE PROFANUM,” ISSUE 61 GGNG NEWSLETTER
So, rights, which are supposed to be sacred and inviolate are now equated with ‘democracy,’ a purely terrestrial concept, the very essence of the profane. We can only have rights the ‘democracy’ grants us, rather than those rights being inherent in our individuality or given to us by God.
To continue exercising our rights means submitting to the whim of the majority, their immediate needs. This is that typical appeal to the ‘common good’ and all those other Star Trek/Marvel level platitudes that are shoved down our throat by the purveyors of the profane (and the obscene) in Hollywood.
Any celebration of the sacred is to be met with brutal denunciation. The gatekeepers of the profane in the media — critics, columnists and talk-show hosts — are all hyper-aware of these threats. They perform their role as gatekeepers almost unconsciously.
In mythological terms the gargoyle guards the entrance to the temple, the profane that guards the sacred at the cost of his own humanity. Biden defiled the Marine corps having them at his speech, itself a desecration of the location.
It should be considered an unforgiveable offense.
That’s where media enforcement comes in, through amplification of one side and the censorship of the other. It’s why a hundred people fleeing Russia’s mobilization order makes the news but the thousands standing in line at military registration centers do not.
Hungary’s sin was voiced eloquently by Balazs Hidveghi, MEP for Hungary, after the recent vote to strip them of their ‘democracy’ status.
“They are simply unable to accept the fact that the people of Hungary have elected a Conservative government for the fourth time in a row,” the politician argued. “A government that dares to defend its nation’s interests, one that stands in the way of the extreme left’s ideology.
“That is the real ‘sin’ of Hungary, and that is why all these unfounded lies are coming from the left,”
And it is a sin in the minds of the Von der Leyens of the world for the EU represents their new temple, the apotheosis of their mad quest to finally make Communism work.
It’s also a sincere sin that Orban refuses to subordinate Hungary’s Christian morals and values to those “European Values” held so sacred by Von der Leyen. If you weren’t paying attention the Orthodox Patriarch of Serbia presented Orban with its highest honor recently.
On September 5, Patriarch Porfirije presented Orbán with the gold degree of the Order of Saint Sava, which is the highest decoration awarded by the Serbian Church. The ceremony took place at the Carmelite Monastery in Budapest, the current seat of Hungary’s prime ministers.
The news would not, perhaps, be worthy of special note were it not for the Patriarch’s speech justifying the award and Orbán’s response. Both addresses summarize the malaise of today’s Europe. Both represent a welcome example of solidarity and unity among Christian believers belonging to different traditions (Orbán is a Protestant at the helm of a mostly Roman Catholic nation). Both are therefore worth bringing in translation to our readers, as no other outlet in the Western world will do so.
As Srdja Trifkovic put it, this move sees both men as ‘lights in a dark world.’
Von der Leyen’s threat to Italy is the same move just made against Hungary, “Vote the right way, or you will lose the EU’s support.” The problem with that threat, however, is that Italy is not Hungary.
Hungary is a state the EU wants to have fully under its control. Crushing its nationalism and cultural identity is necessary to keep the other Eastern European countries in line and to project a united front, one supernation under NATO, indivisible, with liberty and justice defined for all.
That said, the EU doesn’t need Hungary to survive. But neither can it be allowed to oppose the majority, lest it undermine their authority. That mouse cannot be allowed to roar.
So, not only will Hungary lose its status, because it has exercised its right of refusal to go along with Commissar Von der Leyen’s policies on sanctioning Russia, the EU is now finding that “European Values” no longer require unanimous consent.
The push is on to reform the EU charter to remove each country’s veto power over taxes and foreign policy.
On the other hand, Italy is the second-biggest economy in the EU. It represents the third leg of the tripod on which the entire European Project is built.
So, while the EU wants Hungary crushed to keep Eastern Europe in line and push through its new ‘democratic’ reforms, it needs Italy or the whole EU collapses.
And at that point I have to remind Ms. Von der Lyin’ of the oldest adage in banking.
When you owe the bank $1000 it’s your problem.
When you owe the bank a trillion dollars, it’s the bank’s problem.
And that’s where we are today. Italy’s debt problems thanks to the EU’s mad insistence of keeping control over Italy’s political system are far worse today than they were in 2011 when Silvio Berlusconi was ousted and technocrat Mario Monti was installed.
Mario Draghi only compounded the problem taking the ECB and all of Europe to negative interest rates for nearly a decade. Christine Lagarde was brought in to keep the ball rolling while Draghi was installed to ensure Italy was hog-tied to the EU Commission through COVID relief funds, a bill that Draghi was not able to get passed.
Today Italy’s TARGET2 liabilities are the EU’s liabilities. There is no mechanism to pay them back. There is only default, hyperinflation or both. The leaders of the center-right coalition about to take power in Italy have to realize their leverage in this situation.
Because it is immense and it renders every syllable of Von der Lyin’s threat as hollow and devoid of substance as the power she ultimately thinks she exercises.
And that brings us to the market meltdown we saw after the Fed raised interest rates in the US again by 0.75% on the eve of Italy’s elections and the referenda of four Ukrainian Oblasts to decide who they want to be ruled by, Russia or Ukraine.
The choice for them is simple. The corruption of what they are voting for is meant to complicate that decision.
Every day brings another note about the manufactured energy crisis in Europe using ‘punishing the autocrat Putin’ excuse to cover their real intentions, nationalization of major industries, wholesale debt default and centralization of power across the continent to the EU.
And if it means doing away with functioning capital markets and the middle class that sustains them, then so be it. It’s for the common good, after all.
Another tranche of people finally hit the ‘acceptance’ phase of the Kubler-Ross model on the death of the “Fed Put” and the lie that Europe’s problems are solvable this week. They looked at their portfolios and, waking up from a long, lost weekend at Bernie’s, hit the sell button.
Repeatedly.
Sadly, there are still too many people in ‘denial’ and ‘bargaining’ to really catalyze the revolt against these revolting Eurocrats.
The rush into the US dollar has only just begun. Whatever happens in Italy and Ukraine this weekend will have profound effects on the future of the West.
At the climax of Matt Reeves’ The Batman, Bruce leads the fallen people of Gotham out of the darkness of a biblical flood brought on by the city’s sins to an uncertain future, vowing to finally embrace that role to guard what’s left while the city rebuilds.
I don’t know what Europe will turn into over the next few months, but the one thing we can safely say is that it won’t be a triumph of ‘democracy.’ ‘European values,’ on the other hand, will have been properly defined as the obscenity they truly have become.
* * *
Join my Patreon if you like swearing at autocrats.
