One of the most disgusting and outrageous talking points already being peddled by the Eurocrats and their friends in the liberal mainstream media is that 862,415 Irish voters have no right to block the desired goal of some 450 million Europeans. This distortion of truth should never go unchallenged.
First of all, those few million Irish were actually the only citizens in Europe who were asked for their opinion. The rest of the 446 or so millions were never consulted. How can any politician claim that their voters want the ratification of EU constitution/Lisbon Treaty when the entire political class emphatically insisted on not asking the people? In fact, in many countries politicians openly admit that their voters would have done the same as Irish did, i.e. vote against the rotten thing.
So it is not the few million Irish voters blocking the will of hundreds of millions of other European voters but very clearly a mass of Irish voters against a few thousand politicians and bureaucrats who make up the European power elite. This provides a totally different perspective, doesn’t it?
Secondly, what happened to those 20 million French and Dutch voters who said no to the same document three years ago? Why is their “no” not being counted in? Of course, the spin would not work with such numbers. When Eurocrats speak of 450 million Europeans whose hearts and dreams are supposedly broken because of the tiny number of Irish voters “selfishness” they forget to subtract 64 million French and 16 million Dutch (and actually 4 million Irish) from the grand total. These are the nations that – given the chance – voted down the thing. The only nations to endorse the EU constitution/Lisbon Treaty in a referendum were Spain and Luxemburg. So it is not really a few Irish against the rest of Europe. Actually 60% of the countries that had the referendum on the Constitution rejected it. Oddly, in the cases of Spain and Luxemburg no one claims that the electorate did not really understand the question and voted yes not to the constitution but to show their support for the sitting government. Never have I heard that the real reason why the Spanish voted yes was because they really really wanted Turkey to become a member state. Only when the answer does not please the Eurocrats do they think that the electorate is dumb and does not know what it was all about.
The harsh truth is that no government in Europe that enacts the Lisbon Treaty can continue to pretend to be legitimate. Governments have willfully and knowingly gone against the will of the people, trashed their own constitutions, corrupted their courts to go along with it (thus trashing the rule of law) and started to govern without the consent of the people or the rule of law. Going the way of tyranny is a one-way street – one can only tighten the screws to control the governed and the people will only get more contemptuous and hostile towards their governments as the political suppression increases. This is the path that leads to revolution. Good! As Thomas Jefferson said “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” I have a feeling that more and more people around Europe are ready for it. How about the politicians?
Martin Helme
Brussels Journal, June 20, 2008)