European Union: R.I.P.? … When communism collapsed in Moscow, Prague and Belgrade at the end of the Cold War, ethnic nationalism surged to the surface in all three nations and tore them apart into 24 countries. Economic nationalism is now resurgent across Europe. And it is hard to see how a transnational institution like the European Union, run by faceless bureaucrats, and the 16-nation eurozone it created long survive. As of Monday, Greece and Ireland had been bailed out — Greece with $145 billion, Ireland with $89 billion. All eyes have now turned to Iberia, to Portugal and Spain, where bond prices are sinking and interest rates are rising, and investors are eying the exits. Monday's stock and bond sell-off across Europe testifies to a belief that this storm is far from over. Why cannot a series of bailouts, cobbled together by the EU and International Monetary Fund, contain these serial crises? Two reasons: populism and a return of economic nationalism. – Human Events/Patrick Buchanan

Dominant Social Theme: It is terrible, what is happening in Europe.

Free-Market Analysis: Let us take stock – as WikiLeaks surges around us, as great events gather momentum and hurtle toward us, or away. Events, in fact, that are occurring both quickly and furiously. Embarrassing emails about the world's greatest powers circulate the globe. Delegates meet in Cancun, Mexico to try to flog the dead meme of global warming. North Korea blows up. (Soon it may not even exist as a country). China reels from price inflation. Iron-man Vladimir Putin is increasingly seen to have feet of clay. America, the Great Exception, is convulsed politically and economically. Africa, like the Middle East, is raked by war and famine. South America slumbers no more.

And there is also Europe. Europe, too, as we can see from Patrick Buchanan's article excerpted above, is beginning to fall apart in a serious way. Two years ago, even, it would seem improbable. But two years ago is a very long time. The EU experiment in our view, was begun by the Anglo-American elites after World War II, when the rest of the modern-day economic environment was created – including the IMF, NATO, BIS, World Bank, UN, WHO, etc. For nearly 60 years the project was patiently pushed ahead, with lies about the ultimate goal being told at every level. Today, the lies have been exposed; a desperate group of socialist elitists – Eurocrats who had thought to build the Temple of a New Empire in Brussels – can only clutch their heads and groan as PIG after PIG goes belly up.

There was of course a larger rationale behind the madness. The EU was seen as a way to consolidate and corral funny little European countries with very strong tribal associations – countries that one might ordinarily spend a 100 or even a 1,000 years coercing into a larger union. The EU, originally a trade association, was supposed to do the centralizing by stealth, and today's variant of the EU was only supposed to emerge as a "voluntary empire" when it was capable of standing alone, as a regnant, Charlemagne-esque facility. But now the EU, too, is enmeshed in deep problems. The downturn, no doubt anticipated by the elites, has likely been more intractable than imagined. And the natives are far more restless than planned …

We see this with Global warming, an elite, fear-based meme that was supposed to provide a core "carbon currency" that the Western middle class would accept on its way toward global governance. But somewhere it went awry. Now the US Climate Exchange has shut down, its many multinationals fleeing as if from a kind of corporate plague. As a result, elite plans to create waves of fear-based scarcity promotions have collapsed as well.

Of course, the food-scarcity and water-scarcity promotions continue nonetheless, but it is almost humorous to hear those charged with promoting these fear-based memes try to justify them. Yes, the elite can create shortages in any one of a number of ways, but the idea was to blame the shortages on a warming planet – and if people no longer believe in the promotion's basic building-block, well … the promoters surely have a problem on their hands. And they do.

These are massive promotions, with literally trillions of dollars invested in them. (The elite never does anything in a small way.) Thus it is that hundreds of expensively dressed academics and bureaucrats have gathered in the tottering narco-state of Mexico, in the beautiful, invidious environs of Cancun, where they will spend time desperately trying to resuscitate the rotting carcass of global warming. They will sing to it, using the power of "magick" incantations. They will call it "climate change" and other euphemisms in a desperate attempt to bring it back to life. It will remain obstinately moribund.

It is, in fact, just one of several very obvious core dominant social themes that are failing. These fear-based promotions are intended to stampede the Western world's middle class into accepting a New World Order. But the truth-telling of the Internet has proven a formidable, electronic antagonist. Like the Gutenberg press 500 year before, the Internet is providing enlightenment to those who wish to utilize it. (The press informed by printing bibles so that people could read for themselves how the Word had been manipulated by the elites of the day.) A vicious crisis has driven Western citizens to their electronic boxes as they search desperately for a way to understand what has happened to their once-predictable worlds.

More and more encounter free-market economics, on-line, and in fact a whole different historical narrative. Ultimately, those who choose to investigate further will discover an entirely comprehensible world-view that bears little or no resemblance to what they were taught in school. All over the world, then, an awakening … A New Enlightenment. It may not be enough to combat an apparent, planned, elite consolidation. But it may nonetheless prove quite destabilizing to the powers-that-be. Or perhaps, the elites will find eventually that they have to take a step back as the hoped-for New World Order recedes once again.

There is nothing especially surprising here. It has happened before. History is not written by Great Men, by wars or even natural disasters. History is the outcome of a struggle between power elites who create "history" and the great masses of people who only occasionally understand that they are being manipulated to the benefit of a determined few. Technology plays a big role in this struggle, for it is through new communication technologies that masses are occasionally awakened from their slumber – dreamtimes – to confront the reality of their manipulations and the danger of their aggregate plight. The elite of the day fights back with wars, pestilence, famine, whatever tools are available. History is made and then rewritten and rewritten … until the masses, confused, settle back into sluggish, stultified quiescence.

But right now, today, at this juncture, the Anglosphere – the Anglo-American axis – is not having a great time of it. Things are not, perhaps, going to plan. One can maintain this all part of a strategy to create a larger global crisis, affecting all aspects of human interaction in order to usher in one-world governance (and we have). But what plan is this? Is it one that destroys a basic fear-based promotion (global warming)? Or sends NATO reeling from Central Asia as the Anglosphere breaks once more on the rugged granite of Afghan mountains, defeated by stubborn, illiterate, tribal Pashtuns as before (100 years ago). Or threatens to undue, too quickly, the painfully constructed post World War II order?

The Anglosphere power elite is stubborn, intergenerational and unfathomably wealthy in our view. In their increasing desperation, anything is possible. A war, or wars (more wars) or simply ongoing, deepening economic and sociopolitical chaos designed to steer the world toward the increased centralization that is their goal. Perhaps, in fact, they are willing to sacrifice the euro for a larger, global currency that China and Russia seem to want. And yet … it is obvious the elite did not foresee the Internet. Its truth-telling has exposed them in an almost indescribable way.

It has "outed" the conspiracy – their conspiracy – and a conspiracy that is subject to the constant scrutiny of thousands of blogs and millions of articles is no conspiracy at all. Is it possible that Dark Ages are receding? People seem to be finding out about human history once more. Information about alternative ways of treating disease is increasingly available, as is an alternative view of economics and money. Ancient history is increasingly revealed, including the great civilizations of pre-history now drowned under a risen sea.

Is history in fact repeating itself? Is it retracing, in a sense, the events to which the Gutenberg press seems to have given rise: the Renaissance, the Reformation and even the populating of the New World? In Iceland, they are writing that tortured country's first constitution; we have a feeling it will be far more radical than the one the EU tried (and failed) to pass. In Britain, Ireland and Greece, students and union workers take to the streets to show their dissatisfaction with the "austerity" that the Euro-elites are trying with increasing desperation to establish. In the dank bowels of the EU parliament itself, UK's UKIP leader Nigel Farage – a dapper man now quite recovered from his unfortunate, private plane crash – rises and speaks to the assembled Eurocrats:

Just who the hell do you think you people are? … You are very, very dangerous people, indeed … Untold millions must suffer so that your Euro dream can continue. … Well it won't work. Because it's Portugal next, with their debt levels of 325% of GDP, they're the next ones on the list, and after that I suspect it will be Spain. And the bailout for Spain would be seven times the size of Ireland's and at that moment all of the bailout money has gone – there won't be anymore. … If you rob people of their identity. If you rob them of their democracy, then all they are left with is nationalism and violence. I can only hope and pray that the Euro project is destroyed by the markets before that really happens …