First, and very fittingly, it was the Vatican with the launch of H20, the official Roman Catholic Web-based television channel, in December last year.

In April this year, a consortium of international, national, regional and local European broadcasters launched the European radio network Euranet, a pan-European media website conforming to European Commission directions, so as to enable EU citizenry to become better acquainted with—and more accepting of—EU policy directives.

On September 17, the powerful European Union online interactive television channel, Europarl, was launched, having four individual platforms—each dedicated to separate market segments—offered in 22 different languages.

Euranet strengthened its presence by launching a new multilingual, interactive “community on Web” Internet platform, www.euranet.eu, on November 11. Euranet’s radio programs and its new interactive community Internet platform are offered in nine languages.

Then, on November 20, the daddy of them all was unveiled when the EU launched its huge European digital library website, www.europeana.eu. This new site is destined to eventually carry around 10 million digitized items demonstrating the powerful influence that European culture (a large part of it being “Holy” Roman Empire culture) has had on the world. The site was so overwhelmed by users on the day it opened that it had to close to allow time to double its computing capacity.

The launching of Europeana completes a powerful mass media foursome of state-of-the-art, Web-based sources, each designed to create not only European but, very importantly, global awareness of the increasing geopolitical impact of the rising European superpower. The European Union is now so far out in front in the media-driven global culture wars that any opposing culture—in particular pan-Islamism—is being left far behind in the dust. The Vatican, with these Catholic-dominated Internet resources, is winning the cultural crusade hands down!

Few commentators have picked up on the significance of the EU’s drive to dominate the Worldwide Web with the latest of sophisticated technology. It is simply an effort to use the mind-shaping power of mass media to send the EU’s message to the world. The essence of the message is that the EU is intent on becoming the dominant power—religiously, culturally, economically, politically and, increasingly, militarily.

This powerful global media presence, using the Worldwide Web as its chief tool, comes at a time when Anglo-American media dominance is on the wane. It comes at a time when Anglo-Americans are on the back foot culturally through the impact of politically correct multiculturalism—with their religious influence weakened, their economy fractured, their nations’ political influence drastically reduced, and, in addition, the countries’ military might greatly weakened by logistical overstretch, battle weariness and the loss of public support for their military efforts.

Anglo-American world dominance is yesterday’s news.

The rapid waning of the U.S. superpower in particular presents a classic opportunity for the EU—the globe’s single greatest trading combine—to come out of the closet and strut its stuff on the world stage.

Our longtime readers would know that, more often than not, whenever we mention the European Union we do so knowing that it is a very Germanic idea, created to mask the aspirations of its leading economic and political nation, Germany, for global dominance.

Since the last guns of war were silenced on European soil following World War ii, certain German minds have been busy working undercover to revive the old German imperialist dream and establish a Fourth Reich to lead Europe back to imperial glory. This fact was publicized to multiple millions via the broadcast and printed message of Herbert W. Armstrong with significant power and impact during the latter half of the 20th century.

As Herbert Armstrong explained, using biblical prophecy to underpin his message, what started out as a European Steel and Coal Community that enabled the postwar regeneration of German industry morphed into the free-trade entity of a regulated Common Market, then into a political union—the EU—then a monetary union. All this happened during the latter half of the 20th century while Germany appeared to be paying due penance for its massive war crimes, not being permitted to engage any of its regenerated military force—revived under the nato umbrella—in any combat zone.

That all changed in 1992, with the signing of the Maastricht Treaty opening the way for Germany to increasingly take over from France the political leadership of the EU. The signing of Maastricht—plus the deliberate destabilization of the Balkan Peninsula by the Vatican and Germany, in tandem, recognizing Slovenia and Croatia (previously part of the Republic of Yugoslavia) as separate, sovereign nations—set the scene for the resurrection of each of these old Holy Roman imperial powers. It also opened the way for Germany to reengage its troops in combat.

Since then, the Berlin/Rome faction has become increasingly more strident in the call for Europe to break out of the protective cocoon within which it sheltered throughout the Cold War under U.S./nato protection, and to begin to assert itself as a religious, cultural, political and military force on the world stage.

Significant though the achievements of the Vatican-Germany-EU combine have been to this point, one goal has escaped them: the unifying of a collective European citizenry in willing support of the grand imperial EU dream. That’s where this drive by the EU to achieve world-class status in the field of Web-based interactive media comes into play.

Power, as that venerable teacher of international relations Hans Morgenthau stated, is the control over people’s minds and actions. The influence that mass media exerts over the minds of the masses is potent. Had the leftist press in America been less biased and more balanced in its coverage of the recent U.S. election campaign, we may well have had a different result. As it was, the American mass media industry overwhelmingly endorsed President-elect Obama to saturation point.

The power of mass media to effect a national mind change was clearly demonstrated in both Britain, in a positive way, and Germany, in a very negative way, during World War ii.

Winston Churchill’s moving speeches, broadcast nationwide by radio, aroused a quiescent, appeasing British nation to fight tooth and nail for the freedom of the world for two full years before the United States entered the war.

That Nazi Germany honed propaganda to a fine art in preparation for, and in the conduct of, World War ii is a matter of historical record. Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist, used all the latest media at his disposal—film, radio and the printing press—to feed the Nazi line to the German people. The result was a German public mesmerized by their Führer’s vision for imperial German dominance.

One young man who dressed in a Hitler Youth uniform in those years was Josef Ratzinger, the current Pope Benedict xvi. This pope knows full well the power of mass media to move people, a fact that the Vatican used to great effect with the live telecast of the funeral of Pope John Paul ii. That grand occasion was aired to a record global audience, riveting the eyes of the world on Rome and reminding the masses of the powerful force that Rome had become in religion and politics through the papacy of the Polish pope, Karol Wojtyla, under whose papacy the entire Soviet Union collapsed.

Now, with both the dominant religious force in Europe and the increasingly predominant institution of the European Parliament possessing their own Web-based television stations; with an EU Web-based radio conglomerate and a grand, interactive, European cultural experience now available to all comers via Euopeana, Rome and Berlin have the tools to really begin forging a mass mind change among the European population. A mind change from that of a public that has been most reticent to embrace the huge EU bureaucracy to one that will become willingly compliant to its multifarious, onerous, anti-democratic, freedom-destroying regulations and yield most readily to the pope’s call, “Europe, return to your [Holy Roman] roots!”

For more on the history and prophecy relating to this subject, read our booklet Daniel—Unsealed at Last!