@LowTaxChloe Your arguments don’t make historical sense. Whether through ignorance or intellectual dishonesty is hard to tell with you people. 1) you misquote Verhofstadt in your original tweet. He says peace is an essential ‘value’ of the EU, not ‘achievement’- a big difference
@LowTaxChloe 2) You then suggest that he - or the EU - is claiming credit for winning WW2. He doesn’t. Nor would he, when he knows, even if you don’t seem to, that the EU didn’t exist then. You did this to make an Arron Banks-style jingo point eg. ‘it woz us wot saved Europe during WW2’
@LowTaxChloe 3) This is entirely (deliberately?) misleading. The EU was part of a project of European unity that emerged from the ruins of post-war Europe, after the 1914-1945 ‘European civil wars’. WW2 was not fought in order to build it
@LowTaxChloe 3) The idea of some kind of union; economic, political cultural, was partly pragmatic. It aimed to rebuild a continent that had all but destroyed itself, defeat communism at a time when communist parties had prestige across Europe as a result of anti-fascist resistance
@LowTaxChloe 4) It also aimed to contain and neutralis the destructive nationalism and power rivalries that had resulted in 2 world wars & numerous other conflicts, by fostering interdependence and cooperation
@LowTaxChloe 5) This pragmatism also had its ‘idealistic’ dimension, represented by Monnet, Schumann and other European ‘founding fathers’ - to create a Europe in which war would become impossible, a liberal Europe that represented the continent’s best values, rather than its worst
@LowTaxChloe 6) This last aim was seen as particularly necessary in a post-war Europe whose last two decades had been dominated by authoritarianism, ethnonationalism, fascism, populism & racism. A continent of shared (liberal) values was seen as the best way to avoid a slide backwards
@LowTaxChloe 7) This is the tradition that Verhofstadt belongs to, and which you trash in order to make your childish Brexit points. There are reasons to critique the extent to which the EU’s success as a ‘peace project’, but they aren’t the reasons you give
@LowTaxChloe 8) In yr second tweet you compound your first mistake, once again conflating winning WW2 w/ another misleading take on Verhofstadt’s comments, that EU claims to be ‘the sole defender of peace in Europe’. He doesn’t, and it doesn’t
@LowTaxChloe 9) Building on that anachronism you say it was American, Commonwealth & Russian soldiers who ‘paid the price’ for what - peace? So France, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Italy, Holland, Spain, Poland, Greece etc (during Sp. Civil War) didn’t ‘pay a price’?
@LowTaxChloe 10) Were there no anti fascist resistance forces then? No Free French or Polish airmen? Even your ‘Commonwealth’ reference is misleading. Australia wasn’t in the ‘Commonwealth’ then and most Australian troops fought in Asia, not Europe
@LowTaxChloe 11) Indians, Kenyans & other ‘native’ troops who fought in WW2 were colonial soldiers, not members of the Commonwealth. NATO was a military alliance of Western European countries under American tutelage, so it didn’t keep ‘Europe’ safe
@LowTaxChloe 12) It’s also arguable whether NATO even kept Western Europe ‘safe’ - a suggestion that takes it for granted that the Soviet Bloc intended to invade Western Europe
@LowTaxChloe 13) So there is a lot of history that you and other Brexit zealots ignore. And you are clearly doing this in order to fire up the Brexit base against the EU, or perhaps simply to please your employers. Who knows? Maybe if we knew who funds the TPA, it would help clarify
@LowTaxChloe 14) But whatever the reasons, you are talking rubbish here. And Verhofstadt is quite right to remind us of the past when ethnonationalism, racism, fascism and authoritarianism plunged Europe into war. And it’s precisely these forces that support Brexit.
Ironic, isn’t it?
Ironic, isn’t it?
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