To those conservatives who have been operating under the assumption that Britain has a special relationship with a special friend called America, I do hope that President Obama has managed to rid you of that notion. I hope that if nothing else, Mr Obama’s typically crass intervention in the affairs of another country will have made you see the glaring truth.
Although Mr Obama has made this clear in previous statements, his “back of the queue” line last Friday was his most unambiguous yet that the “special relationship” is entirely contingent on our obedience to the will of Washington. Some will want to pretend that this is just Mr Obama speaking (or the position of the Democrat party) and a Republican president would surely support our independence. Sorry, ain’t gonna happen. Mr Obama is simply the mouthpiece of the Washington elite, and the Washington elite – whether the blue or the red tribe – hath decreed that our place is in the EU, where we can be used to exercise influence on its behalf.
Many conservatives still don’t see this. They still see the US as a bastion of conservatism, whereas it is in fact the exact opposite – the advocate of a globalist internationalism, where the only truly sovereign nation is the US and everywhere else on the planet must either accept this, or face the threat of sanctions, arm-twisting, threats, or regime change through a manufactured people-power revolution.
The main reason we often fail to see this is that we have been conditioned to see the Cold War as a battle between communism and capitalism, where capitalism defeated communism and there’s an end to it. Yet we fail to understand the real ideological heart of communism, which is not, as many suppose, about the means of production. As John Laughland points out in his brilliant essay, Painting the White House Red:
“…we in the West have failed to grasp the true nature of Marxism-Leninism. This may be because we tend to think of communism as being only about state ownership of the means of production and the command economy. In fact, Karl Marx himself advocated neither. Instead, the true core of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, according to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, was the ideology of dialectical materialism. Derived from Hegel and ultimately Heraclitus, this doctrine—on which Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin all wrote extensively—holds that the world is in a constant state of flux, that nothing is absolutely true or false, and that progress comes from the constant union of opposite.”
He went on:
“[Marx and Engels] eulogised the unstoppable revolutionary force of what we now call ‘globalisation’ and what Mikhail Gorbachev called the ‘one world economy.’ ‘All fixed, fast-frozen relations,’ they enthused, ‘with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into the air, all that is holy is profaned.’ According to dialectic reasoning, it was precisely the international, cosmopolitan nature of the bourgeoisie that would dissolve existing borders and social structures and thereby prepare the ground for the creation of a homogeneous international proletariat and the unification of humanity.”
In other words, Marx and Engels were prophets of Globalisation, which they welcomed as a revolutionary force which would destroy existing social structures (family, traditions, the nation state). Globalisation is therefore the very antithesis of conservatism, and it is no coincidence to find many modern Marxists now aligning with the US and its ideology of funding and promoting regime change and people power revolutions around the world.
This globalist revolution is driven by the idea of American exceptionalism, something that is basically messianic in nature, since it proposes world salvation by US-style or US-imposed “democracy”, and its ideological adherents are prepared to justify any amount of regime change, destabilisation of nations, and wars, ostensibly in the cause of “democracy promotion”, but all in the aid of a higher cause where the end justifies the means.
The EU is a fundamental part of that project – an experiment in the erosion of borders and national sovereignty, where countries are subsumed into a supranational mush, firmly under the control of the US. For the Washington elite, Britain is simply a useful tool for the project, wielding influence on behalf of the US, but also crucially a means of keeping the EU together (since other countries may well decide to go down the path of independence if we do vote to pull out). In the eyes of Washington, that cannot be allowed to happen. We simply don’t have the right to chart our own destiny as an independent and sovereign nation, hence Mr Obama’s blatant threat of consequences should we make that decision.
The irony is that the same US administration, which constantly harps on about the territorial integrity of nations and the democratic rights of peoples to choose their own path, is quite prepared to violate the territorial integrity and democratic rights of people when it suits their agenda. It is also quite prepared to brazenly wade into another country’s referendum process and threaten people if they dare to exercise their democratic vote in a way that might upset the globalist project.
Mr Obama’s comments ought to have awakened a few more conservatives to see this. The US is no longer the conservative country many conservatives suppose it to be – or rather, I should say, that its leadership certainly isn’t. It is instead the promoter of the “globalist democratic revolution”, an interventionist and internationalist agenda that is as antithetical to true conservatism as is old-fashioned socialism. I think it’s worth being pushed to the “back of the queue” to resist this odious project.
