Today in Britain, among “people like us” – you may recognize that as a Thatcher phrase - the book we are reading is Julian Jackson’s new biography, “A Certain Idea of France: the Life of Charles de Gaulle.”
To see if people like you might be reading it, too, I’ve just gone through the New York Times non-fiction best-seller list.
All I can come up with are books on a biotech start-up, Michelle Obama, environmental panic, the Kushners, and the troubles in Northern Ireland.
No Charles de Gaulle.
I have to assume that the magnificence and occasional malice of the greatest Frenchman since Napoleon is not of interest to Americans.
I have to assume that the magnificence and occasional malice of the greatest Frenchman since Napoleon is not of interest to Americans.
A pity for many reasons, but mostly because anyone reading Jackson’s book would find in it evidence of the betrayal of the European nations by the United States.
I do not mean the dismissal of the courageous war-time de Gaulle by Franklin Roosevelt as “the head of some French committee.” I do not just mean the muddled reaction of the Americans in 1947 to the post-war division of Europe into Communist and Western camps.
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Franklin D. Roosevelt, Churchill, Giraud, and DeGaulle in Casablanca, 1943[/caption]
I mean the post-war support and secret financing of what became the European Union (EU).
I am writing this from the political and democratic wreckage of the United Kingdom.
The wreckage has been caused by the struggles of the plain people of this country to break free of the EU. The British and European elite will not allow it. It was the United States who handed the elite exactly that power.
The people of the UK did not create the EU, they did not design this steel-jaw trap in which they have been caught. No people of any country created the EU. It was the creation of a post-war anti-democratic unelected elite who succeeded in establishing this trap only because the State Department and U.S. intelligence services funded their scheme by secret payments throughout the 1950s.
The EU is the creation of the U.S. State Department and intelligence services
The nature of the payments was covered at first by calling them the Marshall Plan.
What was presented as an altruistic gesture to rebuild the economies of Europe also contained a quiet political component: the payments were to promote a federal Europe. Even at the time the European internationalists supporting the Plan declared it was aimed at “a complete European Union.”
Who were the members of this anti-democratic European elite to whom these millions of US dollars were given?
Start with Jean Monnet.
If you read through Jackson’s book, you will find his figure moving in and out of the background, in particular in post-war Washington.
Monnet is a figure now unknown to Americans, indeed is a figure not one European in a thousand could pick out from a police line-up, even though every schoolchild in every EU country is taught that Monnet is “the father of Europe.” Monnet was just that grey. What perfect camouflage it was.
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A German Stamp Issued in 1977, featuring Jean Monnet[/caption]
Monnet was a provincial Frenchman born in 1888, a cognac salesman without a university degree, who was never elected to anything. Yet he made himself the most effective behind-the-scenes manipulator in 20th century Europe - and the most effective European manipulator in post-war Washington.
De Gaulle had the wisdom to loathe Monnet almost from the moment he fled Vichy France in 1940 and landed alone in England. Monnet was there ahead of him, already on manoeuvres trying to establish a new Europe that would, at the end of the war, have its national borders dissolved.
Monnet despised the nation state. He damned national power as “national egoism.” He hated democracy as messy, and supported supranational rule by technocrats who were not tethered to national feeling. (It is no accident that the technocrats in Monnet’s creation, the European Commission, are trained never to mention the name of their home country. If forced to refer to their homeland, EU technocrats must refer to it only as “the country I know best.”)
The technocrats in Monnet’s creation, the European Commission, are trained never to mention the name of their home country. If forced to refer to their homeland, EU technocrats must refer to it only as “the country I know best.”
De Gaulle could not tolerate this attitude. Everything he did was to protect the culture, history, independence, honour, territory, faith, and, yes, the power and glory of France.
You would think the United States, victorious after the Stars and Stripes defeated both Germany and Japan, would understand this deep love of country. Yet after the war, the United States, in particular the State Department, decided to support the vision of Monnet.
The State Department thought it was in American interest to destroy any idea that the ancient nations of Europe could stand and speak as independent states. National independence must be subsumed to non-national technocrats. But the elite should do this in secret.
Let me emphasise this. The plan was not to establish inter-government co-operation across the European states. It was for the establishment of a supra-national power, a power above national governments and national parliaments, which would not be subject to democratic elections.
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U.S. Commissioned Marshall Plan Posters Urging European Unity, 1950[/caption]
The final accomplishment of this came only in 2009 with the establishment of the European Constitution, re-named the Lisbon Treaty. It established in law the European Union as a “legal personality,” above and apart from the gathering of member states of the EU.
Was this a long delay? No delay is relevant to the supra-nationalists such as Monnet. In 1945, when faced with what looked like a set-back, he wrote: “There are no premature ideas. There are only opportunities for which one must learn to wait.”
By the way, you will notice, if you are alert, that the EU has stopped calling the members of its union “states.” They are “member states,” with that adjective always attached. The naïve assume that the adjective leaves the meaning much the same. It does not. An adjective modifies. In this case, “member” modifies “state” as “wooden” modifies “leg.” It changes the essence.
The member states are now under the powers of the supranational “legal personality” of the European Union.
Blame globalist U.S. foreign policy.
Blame globalist U.S. foreign policy.
One can follow the American money which created this supranational monster from the Marshall Plan through the Organization of European Economic Co-operation, with earlier support through the Rockefeller Foundation.
However, what are most interesting are the significant secret payments which followed a meeting in 1948 between European internationalists with William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, one of the founders in 1947 of the CIA, and Allen Dulles, later to become head of the CIA under Eisenhower.
Without going through all the details, eventually something called the American Committee on United Europe (ACUE) was set up. It was a conduit to provide covert CIA funds and private money from the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation, to promote the U.S. government’s policy of a united Europe.
How do we know about these secret payments? Only because of the disclosure in 2000 by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the best reporter on the British Daily Telegraph, of work at Georgetown University by a researcher called Joshua Paul.
Paul located de-classified intelligence documents which included documents showing the secret payments and showing that the U.S. intelligence service was trying to push Britain into a European state (for which, if you have been paying attention, “legal personality” is a euphemism.)
The reports were later published in a history of the EU, Great Deception by Christopher Booker and Richard North.
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Former Sec. of State John Kerry with EU Foreign Affairs Chief Federica Mogherini[/caption]
The authors tell us, “ACUE funding was secretly channelled to a range of individuals and organisations working for European integration, from politicians such as Paul-Henri Spaak [Belgian socialist politician and internationalist] and trade unions to such influential British magazines as Lord Layton’s The Economist and the intellectual monthly Encounter.”
“However, the major beneficiary of ACUE funding was the European Movement. Between 1949 and 1960, it was kept afloat almost entirely on $4 million of CIA money, these contributions amounting to between half and two-thirds of the Movement’s income.”
“However, the major beneficiary of ACUE funding was the European Movement. Between 1949 and 1960, it was kept afloat almost entirely on $4 million of CIA money, these contributions amounting to between half and two-thirds of the Movement’s income.”
At this time, ex-CIA Donovan, in theory by now just a private lawyer, was chairman of the ACUE.
There was more.
Secret interference by the State Department continued into the 1960s. A memo from the European section, dated June 11, 1965, advises Robert Marjolin, the vice-president of what was then called the European Economic Community, to pursue monetary union by stealth. The memo recommended suppressing debate until the point at which “adoption of such proposals would become virtually inescapable.”
There precisely is the policy, designed in Washington, D.C. and implemented in Brussels: stealth in all policies until they become entrenched.
If it had not been for U.S. foreign policy and money in the 1940s and 1950s, there would be no supranational European Union today, manoeuvring by stealth to make the EU “virtually inescapable.”
Just ask the plain people of Britain how inescapable the EU is proving to be.
I am standing in the wreckage of the democracy of the United Kingdom caused by trying to escape this supra-national, elitist, anti-democratic, technocratic, anti-national, anti-patriotic – go on, choose whatever poison-by-globalization adjective you like, they all fit – and I can only say to America's elites: you willed this monster into being. This is your fault.
