Indoctrinating Their Youth
The European Union’s draft constitution requires ratification by all 25 member states to go into effect. Last spring, France and the Netherlands rejected the document. However, the European Commission—the bloc’s legislative body—said that, instead of the constitution being dead, it was time for a “period of reflection.” In fact, the EU appears to be forging ahead almost as if nothing happened.
To take one somewhat disconcerting example, the Commission is ensuring that the constitution is taught to Europe’s schoolchildren as though it were in full force.
A textbook, distributed to over 120,000 primary schoolchildren across the Continent, takes two children through the complexities of the EU, led by a character named Good Father Houpette. “‘You will be astonished by what I will tell you,’ Father Houpette tells them. ‘You will see that the EU is a necessity.’ … When they arrive at the chapter on the constitution, the children are pictured reading the rules and regulations of an indoor sports hall. ‘Not long ago the European Union was given regulations such as these,’ Father Houpette says. ‘With this new constitution everything will go like clockwork, just like in your club.’ There is no mention of the fact that the constitution was rejected by French and Dutch voters” (Telegraph, Nov. 20, 2005; emphasis ours).
Britain’s Tories denounced the textbooks. Shadow Foreign Secretary Liam Fox said, “It is quite clear that the commission are determined to ram through the constitution, despite any democratic objections. And to do so they are using propaganda that would have been more at home in the brainwashing era of the Soviet-dominated Eastern Bloc. To top it all they are using our taxes to pay for it.”
Like Soviet brainwashing propaganda, indeed. Or, we could add, like the propaganda of Hitler’s National Socialist Party through his spin doctor Goebbels or his youth indoctrination program.
What kind of government would put something up for a vote only to ignore its rejection by the citizens—even to the point of teaching it to its school children as though it were in effect? Not a democracy. On a continent with fascist-imperialist tendencies, we must not ignore these trends.
