In April, the European Council&nbsp;<a href="https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2023/04/13/ammunition-for-ukraine-council-agrees-1-billion-support-under-the-european-peace-facility/?utm_source=dsms-auto&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=Ammunition%20for%20Ukraine%3A%20Council%20agrees%20%25u20ac1%20billion%20support%20under%20the%20European%20Peace%20Facility">agreed</a> to send € 1 billion of ammunition to Ukraine.&nbsp; The structure which disburses these funds is called, without irony, the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/european-peace-facility/">European Peace Facility</a>.&nbsp;In today’s EU, war is peace.&nbsp; The EU foreign policy representative, Josep Borrell, tweeted last year that the conflict could be solved only on the&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/JosepBorrellF/status/1512778455766683652?lang=en">battlefield</a>. &nbsp;Borrell said this after the talks between Moscow and Kiev, which had started immediately after the Russian invasion, were broken off on the insistence of the then British Prime Minister and chief architect of Brexit, Boris Johnson.&nbsp;Borrell’s Tweet was on 9 April, the very day Boris visited Kiev to tell Zelensky that Putin was a war criminal with whom there should be no negotiation.So the European Union, originally created to promote peace in Europe, now promotes war.&nbsp; The European Union, allegedly created to give Europe more weight on the world stage, in fact takes its foreign policy from non-EU capitals, London and Washington.&nbsp; The European Union, which is supposed to create economic prosperity, is pursuing policies which are impoverishing Europeans.&nbsp; The European Union, which is supposed to promote and consolidate democracy has fast-tracked candidate status for one of the least democratic and most corrupt countries on the continent – corruption of which Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, are a part.These contradictions are nothing new.&nbsp; On the contrary, they are more than a century old.&nbsp;In 1899 and 1907, peace conferences were held in The Hague which led to the creation of supranational institutions supposed to guarantee peace through law.&nbsp; The Permanent Court of Arbitration created in 1899 (and still in existence today) was housed in the Peace Palace built by the American steel magnate, Andrew Carnegie, in 1913.&nbsp; Carnegie encouraged the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, to hold a peace conference in Berlin the following year but the First World War broke out instead.&nbsp; The peace movement had encouraged states to identify themselves with “civilisation” and “humanity” and so each side in 1914 thought of the other as barbarians.&nbsp; This made negotiations impossible – the warring parties became entrenched both literally and metaphorically - and indeed the war ended in 1918 without a proper peace treaty but instead only an armistice and then the Versailles diktat.But the spectacular failure of the new institutions to prevent the Great War did not dent globalists’ belief in supranationalism, for which peace was a convenient pretext.&nbsp; The League of Nations was set up in 1920, together with the Permanent Court of International Justice (today’s International Court of Justice).&nbsp; Here again, the American role was decisive.&nbsp;Woodrow Wilson was the principal architect of the League of Nations - even though the US Senate refused to ratify the Versailles treaty and so the USA never joined.&nbsp; Instead, Wilson’s Fourteen Points broke up central Europe into unviable states on the territory of the Austro-Hungarian empire, which the Americans were determined to destroy.&nbsp; As Jacques Bainville and John Maynard Keynes warned in their respective books on the political and economic consequences of the peace, the American “peace” made European war inevitable.The Americans argued with especial conviction that peace would be guaranteed by trade.&nbsp; Just as the British author, Sir Norman Angell, claimed in 1910 that war was no longer possible because of economic interdependence, a theory for which he was awarded the Nobel peace prize in the fateful year of 1933, even though it had been invalidated by the First World War and was soon to be invalidated by the Second, so in 1939 the World Trade Center created at the New York Universal Exhibition adopted as its slogan “World Peace through World Trade.”&nbsp;This did not prevent world conflict breaking out that September.&nbsp; But in fact, these people really regarded economic integration as a political weapon.&nbsp;The League of Nations was based on the belief that economic sanctions would henceforth replace military warfare: that conviction also emerged unscathed from the inability of sanctions to constrain states like Italy in 1935 and it continues to constitute the default position of the EU since February 2022, which has similarly tried (and failed) to constrain Russia by economic means.After the Second World War, the Americans were again at the forefront of creating supranational organisations ostensibly aimed at peace but in reality intended to be an instrument of war.&nbsp; The Marshall Plan set up and financed the first pan-European structure, the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation, in 1948, which the following year stated that its goal was to create “a single European market”.&nbsp; In 1948 the Americans also set up the International Authority of the Ruhr to control Germany’s industrial heartland: its functions were taken over by the European Coal and Steel Community after that body was announced, again with US support, in 1950. The ECSC is the basis of today’s European Union. In 1950 the Americans encouraged the Europeans to create a single European army, the European Defence Community, to face down Soviet Russia.&nbsp; Today’s Euro-American financial and military support for war against Russia in Ukraine is only the continuation of the same old policy, except that the cold war has now become hot.&nbsp;Supranational organisations do not create peace.&nbsp; Peace comes only when warring parties decide to make it.&nbsp; You cannot create peace in a marriage by making divorce illegal ; you cannot prevent conflict between countries by making war illegal or by imposing other forms of constraint to bind them together.&nbsp; Worse, supranational organisations encourage states to think in ideological terms – to believe that they embody universal values.&nbsp; This in turn encourages the belief that any state which refuses to accept those values must be destroyed because the existence of a rival value system invalidates their claimed universalism.&nbsp;Today, the EU and NATO together say that they stand for “the rules-based international order”, a view so blatantly hypocritical coming from the authors of the NATO wars of 1999 and 2011 that it has been rightly dismissed by Vladimir Putin thus, “Who has ever seen these rules? Who agreed or&nbsp;approved them? Listen, this is just a&nbsp;lot of&nbsp;nonsense, utter deceit, double standards, or&nbsp;even triple standards! They must think we’re stupid.”&nbsp;The self-elevation by members of supranational organisations to the status of representatives of the highest values of humanity only makes them to think of their adversaries as inhuman.&nbsp;You do not negotiate with people you dismiss as inhuman – Untermenschen - and so instead you pursue war against them, as in Ukraine today.Peace in Europe will come not from the millenarian musings of American oligarchs in The Hague in 1913 but instead from the wisdom expressed in the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713.&nbsp; In that agreement to end the war of the Spanish succession, and for which the British court composer George Frideric Handel composed a glorious ode, the key to enduring peace was “a just balance of power” between European states.&nbsp;“Balance” implies an equitable relationship between separate entities - not the attempt to control those entities from the top down.

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The State of the EU

This speech was given by FVD MP Pepijn van Houwelingen in Dutch parliament on the 25th of May, 2023.<hr>&nbsp;President,Every abortion is a tragedy. A budding life, human life moreover, is not given the chance to reach maturity but is, in a sense literally, nipped in the bud. And that is tragic. Not only for the unborn life itself, but also for the mother, who carries the baby in her body, and the father, who will never see his son or daughter grow up. Abortion is something we as a society should want to prevent as much as possible.&nbsp;Currently, abortion is in the Penal Code, but the Termination of Pregnancy Act does allow a doctor to perform an abortion under certain circumstances. The initiators of the citizens' initiative we are discussing today want to remove abortion from the Penal Code and treat it as a normal medical procedure. Forum for Democracy is against that.Although always a tragedy, in our view there are circumstances where an abortion is conceivable. For example, when the life of the child or the mother is at risk, or in the case of a rape. A rape of which, incidentally, the unborn life itself is of course innocent. That is the moral dilemma.We can discuss when abortion is acceptable or not, but in any case it is not a normal medical act. After all, it is not, like medical care, aimed at protecting, but at ending life. Human life, especially unborn life, which is most vulnerable and defenceless, should be protected. So, as far as we are concerned, abortion belongs in the Penal Code.In our opinion, this citizens' initiative fits well into the current zeitgeist, which seems to be aimed at normalising abortion. Not the value of (unborn) life, but the freedom of choice of the individual and the social engineering of life are central. Hence, an initiative bill was recently passed in this House to abolish the mandatory five-day reflection period for abortion. When buying a house, the buyer gets a legal three-day cooling-off period, but unborn life is apparently not even worth a day's consideration. What does this say about how much we value unborn life?The embryo law that will soon be debated in this Chamber also fits into this zeitgeist. This law allows embryos, i.e. human life, to be created for the sole purpose of then conducting experiments on them. Once the excel sheets are filled with data, the embryos are discarded.&nbsp;In other words, human life is hereby completely instrumentalised, stripped of its intrinsic value and thus, in our eyes, dehumanised. It is a logical outgrowth of transhumanism, an ideology popular among globalists. An ideology that, taken at face value, conceptualises human life as a kind of bundle of atoms, without free will or intrinsic value. A pile of cells that is infinitely malleable and, moreover, can and must be improved.To such a Brave New World we are, I fear, on our way. A world in which human life is supposed to be completely malleable and malleable. A world in which human life itself is a product that can be made, improved and discarded. A world where nothing is sacred anymore and there are no boundaries to be respected. A world in which human beings create themselves. It is hubris, chairman. It is the tower of Babel in a new guise. It is godless and I say this, chairman, as a member of a secular party.&nbsp;This citizens' initiative is another step in this wrong direction. Removing abortion from the Penal Code will further normalise abortion and thus inevitably further detract from the intrinsic value of life itself. Let us avoid that.

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"We should never normalise abortion"

The National Conservatism&nbsp;<a href="https://nationalconservatism.org/natcon-uk-2023/">conference</a> organised by the US-based Edmund Burke Foundation in London on 15 – 17 May, and which I attended for FVD International, was a fascinating event.&nbsp;Just as FvD’s Simone Kerseboom launches her defence of womanhood in articles and videos, the opening speeches of the conference were devoted to issues which I have never before heard discussed in British Conservative circles: the demographic collapse, the importance of motherhood, the ravages of the sexual revolution and the need to make babies.Among the many outstanding speakers were Miriam Cates, a newly elected “Red Wall” MP, who <a href="https://www.miriamcates.org.uk/news/our-declining-birth-rate">spoke</a> on the demographic crisis which she regards as the most pressing political issue of the day;&nbsp;<a href="https://reactionaryfeminist.substack.com/">Mary Harrington</a> on transhumanism, transgenderism and reactionary feminism;&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/NatConTalk/status/1658084470442868737">Louise Perry</a> on the forces ranged against motherhood in today’s Britain and on the virtues of the pre-modern practice of a woman’s 40-day “lying in” after birth; and&nbsp;<a href="https://edwest.substack.com/p/wont-somebody-please-think-of-the">Ed West</a> on the link between the demographic collapse and inflation.Until Monday, I thought British conservatives only ever talked about the free market and Brexit.&nbsp; Now, it seems, many decades late, and hesitantly if brilliantly, these questions are making their way onto the agenda, especially thanks to the superb web site&nbsp;<a href="https://unherd.com/">Unherd</a>.&nbsp;The link with the actual Conservative Party and government remains, however, ambiguous: as Mary Harrington and others&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/moveincircles/status/1658462579298009093?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet">pointed out</a>, there was a strange convergence of interests between the silly anti-fa protesters outside the conference hall shouting “Tories out” and the conservatives (but not Conservatives) inside it who agreed with them, but for opposite reasons.When I say “many decades late” I am referring to the issue of abortion, which has been one of the main left-right issues in American politics for two generations, and to the issues of gay marriage, in vitro fertilisation and surrogate motherhood which, like Muslim immigration, have defined French conservatism for, respectively, ten years and two generations.Abortion was mentioned only in the briefest and glancing terms in London this week, whereas it is at the centre of the politically and constitutionally most momentous decision in American politics for 50 years, the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the US Supreme Court last year.&nbsp;Surrogate motherhood, which is illegal in France and which is often assimilated to human trafficking by its conservative opponents there, was not mentioned at all.&nbsp;Immigration was discussed, to be sure, especially by the Home Secretary (Interior Minister) Suella Braverman who supposedly embodies a government hard line – even though net immigration into Britain last year, under her watch, was between 700,000 and 1 million.&nbsp; But never once did anyone suggest that specifically Muslim immigration might pose a problem.&nbsp; The very timorous British opposition to immigration therefore omits even to mention the one thing which, above all others, defines French or Dutch opposition to immigration.&nbsp; French or Dutch opponents of immigration could not care less about Poles or Romanians; British ones could not care less about Kurds or Pakistanis.This is why I say that the British debate on these huge societal issues is hesitant.&nbsp; It may also be simply too late.&nbsp; There are, in life, some things that are so broken that they can no longer be fixed - French monarchism comes to mind.&nbsp; The attack on the family in Britain is more than a century old and indeed it was a prerequisite for Britain’s superpower status.&nbsp; The British empire, which is the geographically biggest empire in the history of humanity, was made possible because sons were handed over to institutions (boarding schools) at the age of eight.&nbsp; (Some still are today.)&nbsp; As in ancient Sparta, the family was broken in order to strengthen the state.&nbsp; Industrialisation and, more recently, inflation-based casino capitalism (since the 1970s) and the concomitant rise in property prices, have completed the job: as Ed West brilliantly put it, “The most effective contraception method known to man is the London property market.&nbsp; Youngsters today have cheap luxuries (iPhones) and unaffordable necessities: they will never be able to become property owners.”People at NatCon talked about the demographic tipping point approaching in the next few years, the point of no return after which population decline becomes irreversible.&nbsp; But maybe the destruction of the family in Britain has been irreversible for a century.&nbsp; Certainly, unlike in France, the phenomenon of the large middle-class family does not exist in Britain – the only large families are those who live on social benefits.&nbsp;Louise Perry spoke in favour of “lying in” but this traditional practice is simply not possible given family breakdown and the economic impossibility, in Britain, of extended families living close to each other.One final remark.&nbsp; While I found the cultural and philosophical analyses refreshing and the intellectual level unexpectedly high, I was also surprised, negatively, by the absence of any policy proposals.&nbsp; Yes, the speakers deplored the tax system which penalises marriage.&nbsp; But they did not mention any of the natalist policies which other countries have implemented in the past or at present.&nbsp; France had a natalist policy supported by both Left and Right for the whole of the 20th century after the First World War and abandoned only under François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron at the beginning of the 21st; Hungary and Russia have implemented natalist policies today.&nbsp;The famously pragmatic British should perhaps look at these models and examine whether they can work.&nbsp; Otherwise conservative intellectuals are simply playing “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RcVzevWX4U">Nearer, my God, to Thee”</a> on the deck of the Titanic.

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And the Band Played On: The National Conservatism conference

In Part 1, ‘Bearing the Nation: “Woman” as the last Bastion’, I discussed why womanhood as an exclusive category has come under attack by woke Leftists, trans-activists, and gender theorists. The deconstruction of the meaning of “woman” is an essential step for these Cultural Marxists to facilitate the eventual breakdown of the family unit, which functions as a synonym for the nation. Without the family as a principal structure on which to build a free society and a world of independent nation states, people are uprooted and their loyalty will be formed in such a way during their formative years that it extends solely to the State - whatever form that State might assume. Furthermore, by denying the biological facts of womanhood and, by extension, motherhood, children can be “birthed” and raised by men or machines in a world without any concept of normalcy or a sense of sacredness. When nothing is holy, everything is fair game.With the destruction of womanhood as the last bastion of the nation, the state and the woke ideologists and activists who control the educational institutions have unlimited access to children. This is the natural consequence of de-masculinisation, emancipation, and the disappearance of womanhood. And this is exactly the outcome that these woke institutions and activists aim for.&nbsp;Deconstructing the white patriarchyWokeness, informed by Cultural Marxism and Postmodernism, does not believe in ultimate truths, in good or evil, right or wrong.&nbsp;It believes that nothing has a true meaning outside of the meaning that you create for yourself. Woke ideologists and activists operate under the ingrained belief that they have access to this “truth” about the functioning of society which others fail to see because they are still brainwashed by the current system of power - the white patriarchy.&nbsp;This believes that humans can only be male or female and that thinking in binaries is an essential part of the human experience. They believe that the social conditioning which keeps the white patriarchy in place, and thus privileges this system, has ensured that we believe in the idea that there are only two biological sexes, that only women can give birth, and that there is a difference between the sexes.&nbsp;This moral and social fluidity stands in stark contrast to the firmly rooted traditions which have shaped our societies and over thousands of years and which have ensured their survival. But only the woke can see that you are wrong, that these thousands of years of history are wrong, that sex and gender are nothing more than a social construct which needs to be deconstructed, and it is therefore up to them to spread their knowledge. The biggest problem that woke faces - with, amongst others, their belief that men can have vaginas and women can have penises - is that no one else believes them. Their beliefs are so absurd, that no sane adult can take them seriously. For the woke lobby, that is because we have been socialised to believe the ‘lies’ that the current system of oppression is telling us. But there is a category of humans which has not yet been fully socialised. With a religious zealousness, the woke lobby aims to spread the “truth” to which it has “awakened” those not yet shaped by the oppressive white patriarchy - children.&nbsp;Converting children to the Church of WokeChildren are the perfect blank canvases on which to project a new Cultural-Marxist anti-family and anti-nation globalist ideology which it is impossible to imprint on adults who have experienced the importance of family, the idea of home and belonging, and who fundamentally and instinctively understand the biological differences between the two sexes. Once the family unit has been broken up into its individual components, with parents working all day, while the raising and socialisation of children is left to the schools, day-cares, and after-school programmes, the traditions, values, and religious beliefs that were once passed on from generation to generation within the home, will cease to exist.&nbsp;In their place, teachers will pass on the state ideology, informed by the woke agenda, in the form of the curriculum during class time. Children, spending most of their time away from the home and their parents, will come to see their teachers and the sources they consult as the primary carriers of knowledge and truth.&nbsp; Groupthink, cancel culture, and peer pressure will ensure that any questions or criticisms that parents might still attempt to broach, are quickly sidelined. This is the perfect recipe for creating a new generation of individualised adults who feel no connection to family or country and who blindly believe that morality, gender, and sex are fluid concepts - that binaries and truth do not exist. The only truth that exists is the truth that you create your own reality, meaning, and value in this life. But even that reality has, of course, been informed by the woke curriculum at schools and universities, supported by the media. This will be a world where the traditions, cultures, and religions that shaped societies and their values and ensured that they functioned are erased to make way for a new, globalist ideology that forges the ultimate individualised, atomised human beings, mindful of and subservient to nothing but the state. This is the globalist utopia.Producing content for woke indoctrination of childrenIn countries across the Western world, this battle for the minds of the children has taken on macabre forms, from drag queen reading hours at public libraries to the sexualisation of children as young as four years old in schools under the misnomer of sexual education. In the Netherlands, Spring Fling Week (Week van de Lentekriebels) is a week in which primary schools across the country provide sexual education to their pupils.&nbsp;However, when it recently became clear what was actually being taught under the guise of “sexual education”, (masturbation, transgenderism, sexual acts, etc.), it caused an uproar, and rightfully so. More importantly, the foundation which provides this “educational” material to schools, the Rutgers Foundation, is an organisation founded from paedophile sexual rights groups.<a href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> Meanwhile, an increasing number of children’s books addressing gender transitioning are being published.<a href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> &nbsp;On television programmes like Gewoon Bloot. (“Simply naked,” based on the Danish programme Ultra smider tøjet), adults expose their naked bodies to children who can then ask questions. In one particular episode, naked transgenders explain to children between the ages of 10 to 12 how wonderful, even euphoric, it is to transition and that you can be born like a boy but feel like a girl on the inside, or the other way around, or that you can even feel like “nothing”.<a href="#_ftn3">[3]</a>The idea that your body does not reflect the way you feel inside, or that you feel uncomfortable in your body, is being brought as a valid argument for mutilating an otherwise healthy body in order to reflect a feeling you might have. This blatantly ignores the fact that many of us felt somewhat uncomfortable with our bodies when becoming teenagers and that this is, in fact, normal. The supposed innocent and jovial presentation is nothing short of a Disneyfication of bodily mutilation. The format of this television programme is also broadcast in the UK (Naked Education), where it was also met with a barrage of complaints about adults stripping naked in front of children.Leading the resistanceBy going after our children, woke has overplayed its hand. Conservatives, always on the backfoot when it comes to responding to progressive challenges, said “ok” to the normalisation of homosexuality, we said “ok” to gay marriage, we said “ok” when men wanted to become women, and we said “ok” when men wanted access to women’s spaces. But by attempting to destroy the minds and innocence of our children through sexualisation and anti-family indoctrination in our schools and through the media, woke has gone a step too far. When woke said that it wanted our children, we said, “No.”Outrage, uproar, and complaints by parents and conservatives are just one facet of the pushback we are seeing in the Western world. Florida, for example, has implemented several child-protection laws specifically aimed at the woke agenda. But it is essential that parents who want to protect their children, and conservatives in general, are made aware of what is being taught to their children when they are away from the protective space of their families. They need to be aware of the subtle - or not so subtle - messaging in children’s programmes and in books.Most of all, when it comes to our children, we need to speak out in chorus, unwavering in the face of cancel culture, of being called bigots, fascists, homophobes and worse. Conservatives need to stop thinking that woke will leave them alone, that being decent to woke ideologists will eventually lead to a discourse of mutual respect. This is not how woke works. We need to form alliances that put aside the petty squabbling about particularities that has characterised the conservative bubble and actively reaffirm our values - our love for the nation, our traditions, the home, and the family. We need to support one another and speak up fearlessly, fiercely and bluntly. There are no apologies when we act to protect our children. There is no retreat and there will be no turning back.&nbsp;<hr><a href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> Everardus, ‘De Radicale Grondleggers van Rutgers’, Reactionair, at https://reactionair.nl/artikelen/de-radicale-grondleggers-van-rutgers/<a href="#_ftnref2">[2]</a> https://www.youtube.com/shorts/h_QEHugsrfY<a href="#_ftnref3">[3]</a> https://www.zapp.nl/programmas/gewoon-bloot/gemist/VPWON_1329168

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Part 2 - Targeting the vulnerable: Why Woke wants our children

Speech given at the Gala Dinner on the occasion of CPAC Hungary in the Royal Riding Hall, Budapest, May 4, 2023Dear Madame President, Distinguished Participants and Organizers of the conference, Ladies and Gentlemen,Many thanks for the invitation and for giving me the opportunity to address this distinguished audience. It is an honor for me to share the floor with one of the most outspoken and courageous representatives of – what I would dare call – the Hungarian way of coping with the current post-democratic, more or less socialist, in any case progressivist world, with President Katalin Novák.It was certainly not a coincidence that our meeting at the beginning of January took place in Rome, where we both attended the funeral of one of the pillars of contemporary conservatism Pope Benedict XVI., one of the heroes of the current, non-heroic times. It was colder in Rome than either of us expected. Madame President was even more lightly dressed than me, but, as I see it now, she survived without consequences.I deliberately used the term “Hungarian way”, which – I believe – is an appropriate term. Hungary is a unique phenomenon in the current world. In the 1990s, I coined the term “the Czech way” of the post-Communist transformation, but that has been already forgotten and, to my great regret, we don’t have any Czech way of dealing with the contemporary problems we – together with all of you – face. We have accepted the role of a passive object of recent developments, a passive object in the hands of those who are masterminding the current world.Hungary is different. It dares to have its own specific way of defending both its national interests and the traditional values of human society, especially of its Western part. Hungary follows its own way regardless of hostile reactions in the commanding heights of progressivism, globalism, multiculturalism, aggressive genderism, environmentalism and other ideologies of that kind. These ideologies originate in the West, not in the East or South. I shortly discussed them in my last year’s presentation at this conference.Given the strong Hungarian stance, the Second Conservative Political Action Conference rightfully takes place here, in Hungary. I would like to use this opportunity to express my thanks to the organizers, both to the Hungarian Center for Fundamental Rights and to our American friends from the CPAC, for making the conference possible.This year’s conference – like last year’s one – should inspire and motivate us and should turn to a symbol of a much needed change in our spirit and resolution. Only thus we would be able to send a signal that we are here and are here to stay.We have been on the defensive for a long time, in fact since – at least for us in Central Europe – the glorious years of the fall of communism and of the era which immediately followed. Since then, our attitude has become mostly defensive. We have tried to minimize losses by opposing the most visible irrationalities of the current progressivist era only. I am ready to accept that my position is biased by living in the Czech Republic and in the EU. When I follow the debate on the other side of the Atlantic, it is not much better there either.As regards human freedom and freedom of speech, as regards our ability to guard traditional conservative values and our culture, as regards economic rationality and efficiency, which depends on the functioning of free markets, and last but not least as regards the very fragile geopolitical arrangements, we have been on the losing side.Because of the strength of the American spirit, of its rich civic society, of its huge intellectual stock of talents and devoted activists, as well as of its economic and military strength, our American friends may see it differently. It was evident here last year. I returned home with a feeling that I am – perhaps – unnecessarily pessimistic. But being confronted with the European reality, I very quickly returned to my previous fears and continued to express my warnings about naivism and wishful thinking flourishing among our followers and supporters. I haven’t been to the United States for a couple of years now, but looking at it from a distance doesn’t give me much hope or joy either.Our society has taken a wrong turn. Together with Friedrich von Hayek (and more recently with Anthony de Jasay), we should know how slippery the newly taken road is and will be. Our leading politicians, with the exception of Hungary, are either unaware of this or even actively contribute to these developments.It is not just the fault of politicians. It has deeper roots. I recently came across a speech delivered here in Budapest four years ago by one of America’s great conservatives, Ed Feulner, and found a sentence in it, which I find relevant: “perhaps more disturbing than the rhetoric of politicians is the brainwashing of the youth by our education system”. &nbsp;It starts there.The conference motto “United We Stand” is a wisdom confirmed by history. It is a powerful, understandable and useful slogan. We all know its opposite: divided we fall. But one caveat should be made. We shouldn’t restrict its validity to the issues of war and we should carefully select with whom and on what topics to unite.It is not easy. Our most important enemy is hidden in the field of ideas. Our enemy is not easily detected and exposed because this field is vast and unstructured. It was much easier in the Communist times. We face several dangerous isms and their danger is strengthened by their synergy. Together they have already reached the point of a critical mass, which threatens to destroy all what the conservatives believe in.We should listen to each other. I myself came here to learn because I accept that most of us are on the demand side of ideas, not on the supply side.Many thanks for your attention.

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Hungary Is Defending Its National Interests,  Traditional Values and Normalcy

The coronation of King Charles III in Westminster Abbey, London, on 6 May 2023 is an extremely rare event, full of important political lessons for conservatives, interested as they are in the conjunction of tradition and statecraft.It is rare not only because the last coronation occurred in 1953, before most of us were born, but also because there are no other coronations anywhere in the Christian world.&nbsp; All the other European monarchies have abandoned the practice.&nbsp; Even the Pope is no longer crowned, as he used to be, the last papal coronation having been that of Paul VI in 1963.This rarity is all the more striking in view of the second fact which should interest conservatives, namely that the specific ceremony consecrating the new king is extremely ancient.&nbsp; The British happily refer to the coronation of King Edgar in Bath in the year 959 but in fact the consecration of kings took place in Visigothic Spain in the 8th century.Indeed, the <a href="https://www.kcl.ac.uk/consecration-of-the-new-king-what-is-anointing">words of consecration</a> pronounced by the Archbishop of Canterbury when he applies holy oil to the king’s hands, forehead and breast are exactly the same words as those found in the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.9783/9781512821604-007/pdf">Benedictional of Freising</a>, a document which dates from middle of the 9th century describing the coronation ceremony of the Frankish kings and which is the oldest written record of what was, by then, already an ancient practice: “Let this hand / head etc. be anointed with holy oil, as kings and prophets were anointed.&nbsp;As Solomon was anointed by Zadok the priest, so be you blessed and constituted king in this kingdom which the Lord God gave you to rule and govern.”&nbsp;In other words, the ceremony goes back to Biblical times.&nbsp; There are numerous references to the anointing of kings in the Old Testament, i.e. to the millennium which preceded the birth of Christ.&nbsp; The ceremony in London on 6 May has a direct connection with this very ancient practice, in that the oil which will be used comes from Bethlehem, the city of King David, and was consecrated at a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQWunnocG3A">special ceremony</a> in Jerusalem, the city where Jesus of Nazareth, “king of the Jews” according to the inscription Pilate put on the cross, was crucified.This is not just a reference to King Charles’ own connection to the Greek Orthodox church in which his father, Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, was baptized, but, much more importantly, to the ancient kings of Israel whose symbolic role in prefiguring the reign of Christ is expressed by their appearance,&nbsp;<a href="http://ndparis.free.fr/notredamedeparis/dossiers_photos/facade/parisnotredame_facade2.html">in the form of statues</a>, on the Western façade of the cathedral of Paris, Notre Dame.&nbsp; (The original statues were defaced and removed during the French revolution, because they were believed to represent not kings of Israel but kings of France, and were <a href="https://www.revuedesdeuxmondes.fr/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/0f7551bc95643103aba2b5836a18b329.pdf">re-discovered by accident in the 1970s</a> and are now in the Cluny museum.)Another precedent for the ceremony, about which we know more than for ancient Israel, is the consecration of the Christian Roman emperors at Byzantium at the beginning of the first millennium.&nbsp; This ceremony is at the origin of the various European ceremonies of the Middle Ages.&nbsp; The&nbsp;<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59634/59634-h/59634-h.htm">key elements</a> of that ancient Roman ceremony&nbsp;<a href="https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2023-04/23-24132%20Coronation%20Liturgy.pdf">will all be repeated in London on 6 May</a>: the oath taken by the monarch; the anointing by the archbishop; the acclamation of the new king by the people; and then holy communion.&nbsp;In other words, the coronation of King Charles expresses the very essence of European civilization, based as it is on the twin inheritance of Rome (whose culture in turn derives from Athens) and Jerusalem.&nbsp;A ceremony which draws on the practice of ancient Israel and the Roman empire expresses the distinctively European understanding of the state, namely that the sovereign wields his power by the grace of God and according to the terms expressed in the coronation oath (<a href="https://www.persee.fr/doc/bec_0373-6237_1953_num_111_1_461400_t1_0260_0000_000">a key part of the ceremony</a>, and the beginning of it), namely to obey God’s law and to uphold the fundamental laws of the kingdom.Tradition is the great aqueduct which we build and maintain, in order to draw on the very source of our civilisation, which lies outside us, and to transmit it so that it can continue to irrigate both us now and future generations to come.&nbsp; This is the European and worldwide significance of the coronation.

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The Coronation of King Charles III

One of FVD’s MPs has been fined for posting a photoshopped image of two government ministers next to a flag with swastikas on it. Pepijn van Houwelingen explains what happened and why.FVD is an anti-globalist party. We fight for the preservation of our individual freedom and national sovereignty - and thus against the Zeitgeist that has come to dominate the Western world since the end of the Cold War, in which slowly but surely a global technocracy is being developed that increasingly places almost all aspects of our lives in the hands of an all-powerful, supranational government.We see it in the EU, which claims ever more powers. In the World Health Organisation, which started acting like a global 'ministry of health' during Corona. We see it in the rhetoric and plans of the World Economic Forum, in the Marrakesh Immigration Pact, climate treaties, and so on.&nbsp;Global elites, large multinationals and supranational organisations are spinning a web that spans the entire planet, transferring decision-making power over our lives to a globalist level.&nbsp;This megatrend - visible in almost every facet of life - is structured through the so-called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), drafted in 2015 and adopted by the United Nations. These are 17 unachievable, idealistic goals (such as 'no hunger', 'good health for all', 'clean drinking water') that, precisely because of their unachievability, will require endless government efforts.These SDGs - these 'Sustainable Development Goals' - have never been the subject of a proper debate in our country, nor in any other - although pursuing them inevitably means that we will gradually be placed under global technocratic authority. So, through those SDGs, we are moving towards a kind of world government. And all societal players are participating in it.&nbsp;That is why an 'SDG flag day' was established on 23 September last year. The minister of health, Ernst Kuipers, from the left-liberal D66 party, and the Social Affairs and Employment minister, Karien van Gennip, from the Christian Democrats, raised the SDGs' 'flag' to express their full support for the globalist agenda.I tweeted about it at the time. I put the words 'the façade and reality' next to an image of the original photo with the SDG flag, on the left, and, on the right, this flag replaced by the swastika. Inappropriate? Clumsy? Perhaps. Given the nonsensical fuss that followed, I probably should not have done it. Perhaps the comparison with the hammer and sickle flag of communism would have been better.&nbsp; It would have been more accurate because globalism is indeed closer to socialist equality thinking than fascist corporatism - that is, the merger between big business and the all-powerful state envisioned by Mussolini and Hitler. Ultimately, the two are not actually all that different from each other but that is a discussion for historians.Anyway, I removed the swastika and posted a new tweet with the red communist banner. That flag was ignored (the association with communism does not seem to bother anyone) - but the seething reactions to the Nazi flag persisted. The media spoke of a 'Nazi tweet'. I was threatened with suspension as an MP and with being prosecuted in the courts by the government.&nbsp;It’s all a bit excessive, isn't it? We see mainstream politicians and journalists making Nazi comparisons almost daily. I myself was depicted as a 'brown shirt' in NRC Handelsblad and accused in the Chamber of having ‘glorified’ Hitler. Not a week goes by without someone blaming us for 'fascism'. Other FVD members are also constantly being slurred with references to Nazism, Mussolini, "ein Volk, ein Reich" rhetoric, and so on. Apparently, it is all allowed, it is apparently perfectly all right for the establishment to employ that kind of demonisation against the opposition. But if we do it once - however light-heartedly and teasingly - the world is too small. What double standards. What hypocrisy!But secondly, and much more importantly, the very function of free public debate - in which basically anything should be allowed to be said, barring calls for violence - is to exchange ideas and resolve conflicts peacefully. That is where, on the cutting edge, the political fight should be able to take place. Now, with this cheap act of grandstanding, an extremely embarrassing escalation for democracy is threatening, in which MPs try to suspend each other for 'insulting statements' and the government pursues an MP in the courts.Public debate in our country is in a sorry state. Why is it never about substance? Why does the media always choose to magnify a riot and not discuss the point I wanted to make? Why is our freedom of speech, even in our parliament, increasingly curtailed?&nbsp;For the record, I was not trying to compare Kuipers (or Van Gennip) as a person to Nazism. They are merely, we may assume, cooperating with the best of intentions in a system that bears similarities to other totalitarian regimes. &nbsp;But come on, grow up! The SDGs are coming, they are going to undermine your and my freedom. The globalist plans exist, they are being pushed further every day. That is what this is really about, and that is what I will always continue to call attention to, and organise resistance against!&nbsp;

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On the sustainable development goals and my “Nazi” Tweet

Women are the bearers of the nation. They not only physically produce the next generation of citizens, the children that will make up the nation of the future; they also bear the nation in a figurative sense. As mothers and homemakers, women pass on the language, stories, traditions, morals and values which constitute the nation - the narratives and mythologies which are the very foundation stones of our societies.The family is a microcosm of the nation. It is no surprise that the language of nationalism uses the language of the family to portray this larger familial dimension that stands at its foundation. It is embodied by such phrases as mother and father of the nation, sons and daughters of the soil, mother tongue, founding fathers. Although the members of the nation may not all know one another, they know that they are connected through the larger familial bond of a shared history, a shared language and values, and even shared childhood stories and lullabies. This is what constitutes and fortifies the very idea of nationhood.Therefore, at a time that the very existence of nation-states has come under attack, women, in their domestic sphere, have become the last bastion of the nation and of the family. This is also why the progressive Left, under the influence of cultural Marxism, has attacked the family under the pretext of “emancipation” - creating a world where women are free to work for an employer, spend more time away from their families and the home, and leave the raising of children to the school and to the state - if they choose to have children, that is.In the Netherlands, new legislation has been proposed by a progressive party, under the guise of emancipation, that will see full-time workers earn a bonus. This legislation is intended to draw women, who are currently more likely to work part-time, away from the family for even longer.&nbsp; This same political party also proposes longer and more “fulfilling” school days for children. In their Utopia, parents will only give their children breakfast in the morning and tuck them into bed at night. The state will raise them and ensure that the ideas and morals of the state, disseminated through its social institutions, shape these children, thus undermining and subverting parents and the values that they wish to pass on to their children. The desired result is that everyone will think and believe what the state wants them to.This is only one front on which the war against the family is being fought. More recently, we have seen a new attack on women as the last bastion of the nation. This is through questioning the very definition of womanhood by denying biology. The woke rainbow lobby, supported by the progressive Left, has been at the forefront of the destructive attack on womanhood. Women - and for that matter anyone who uses pronouns - are being forced to accept that any man who simply identifies as a woman, is a woman, and are forced to accept these individuals into women’s spaces. In a world where men who say they are a woman are allowed to compete in women’s sports, enter women’s changing rooms, be incarcerated in women’s prisons, and where the medical profession is already investigating the possibility of womb transplantations because everyone should have the “right” to bear children, where do women draw the line? How do women defend the sacredness of the ability to bear life, a biology that predisposes them to flourish in roles as mothers and caretakers, and the sanctity of the family? Never mind the hard fought for rights for access to their own spaces as women. In essence, the progress women have made over the last century is being made undone by men claiming access to exactly that which makes women unique - our biological and social position in society as women.The attack on the definition of woman is, of course, part of the linguistic deconstruction of the family and thereby, by extension, the nation. Mother and father are reduced to caregivers, or even as birthing and non-birthing parent. This slippery slope is reminiscent of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which children are created in factories and the family units of the past are considered as a perverse artefact of an ignorant time.If the bonds between family members are broken, together with the inherent value we place on the roles and relationships which tie the family together, people are reduced to the most rudimentary form of individuality. Without the family, the home does not exist. Without the home, people are no longer rooted in time and place. When these fundamental elements which have shaped human societies for thousands of years are lost, you have nothing left to fight for.&nbsp; You become the perfect global citizen. You are raised by the state with the ideology that the state wishes you to embody. You will be just as happy living in Hong Kong as in Prague. And if you are no longer happy where you are, you simply pack your bags and leave. In that world, political representation no longer has a role to play as no one is rooted anywhere. It is the perfect setting for the global government of technocrats into which we are quickly being dragged.‘Woman’ has become the last bastion that the progressive Left wishes to see deconstructed and made redundant, in order to complete the destruction of the family unit as a microcosm of the nation. They are succeeding.&nbsp;Men have been structurally demasculinised and feminized.&nbsp; They are no longer in a position to protect women effectively. Just as in war, where women are violated to shame and humiliate the men (i.e. the nation) of the opposing side, women were the next in line. With men increasingly incapable of caring for and protecting them, women were taken out of the home to become part of the workforce and distanced from raising their children. And now, ‘woman’ is no longer considered to be a clear biological category, simply an ‘idea’ that anyone can claim as their identity.Perhaps more sinister is that this frontal attack on biology and tradition serves another purpose. With parents left without a solid foundation on which to base their own identity and sense of home in a world where traditional morals and values have been cast aside for hedonistic individualism, who is left to raise the children? This is where the final strategic blow of cultural Marxism will be struck: the impressionable minds of our children, left undefended as the traditions, faith, and morals that once guarded normalcy have been erased by a new, far more sinister ideology and state religion: globalism.

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Part 1 - Bearing the nation: “woman” as the last bastion

The Soviet system was notorious for its political abuse of the judicial system.&nbsp; The memory of the Moscow show trials, in which political opponents were judged as criminals, epitomises the cruelty of Stalinism.&nbsp; How odd, therefore, that the collective West is also abusing the judiciary to pursue political goals.&nbsp; This time, though, the pretext is not Communism but the climate.Two recent decisions demonstrate this abuse.&nbsp; A lobby group and an individual have lodged appeals against&nbsp;<a href="https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng-press#{%22itemid%22:[%22003-7610561-10471513%22]}">France</a> and&nbsp;<a href="https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng-press#{%22itemid%22:[%22003-7610087-10470692%22]}">Switzerland</a> before the European Court of Human Rights, alleging that these countries have not done enough to combat climate change and that the health of citizens is therefore endangered.&nbsp; Two days later, a&nbsp;<a href="https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/LTD/N23/063/82/PDF/N2306382.pdf?OpenElement">resolution</a> was passed in the General Assembly of the United Nations asking the International Court of Justice to rule on states’ obligations to implement international agreements on climate policy.&nbsp;In both cases, the judicial system is being used to achieve a political outcome.&nbsp; Human rights are being instrumentalised in the name of ecologism while international law (the law of the United Nations) is being used to establish top-down worldwide control of energy.These two developments have occurred more or less at the same time as the International Criminal Court issued its&nbsp;<a href="https://fvdinternational.com/article/icc-in-wonderland">ridiculous arrest warrant</a> for the Russian president and Donald Trump was arraigned in a New York courtroom, the first ever criminal indictment of a former US president.&nbsp;George Soros’ long arm was behind both developments : the election campaign of Alvin Bragg, the New York district attorney who has put Donald Trump into the dock, was&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/23/us/politics/alvin-bragg-george-soros-trump.html">financed</a> by a Soros-financed lobby group (there is a huge number of such “progressive” attorneys now in power in the US), while the ICC Prosecutor, Karim Khan, is a life member of the International Bar Association and its Human Rights Institute, which is also&nbsp;<a href="https://www.ibanet.org/document?id=HRI%20Annual%20Review%202020">financed</a> by the Open Society Foundation (as well as by many of the other usual suspects including the Sigrid Rausing Trust).&nbsp; These men are the&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Vyshinsky">Andrei Vyshinsky</a> of our times.&nbsp; Similarly, the European Court of Human Rights has&nbsp;<a href="https://eclj.org/ngos-and-the-judges-of-the-echr">numerous judges</a> who worked for Soros-financed NGOs and many of them even hear cases brought by their former employers, in flagrant violation of the most basic rules against conflicts of interest.The attempt to impose climate policies through the courts is a very serious abuse of both the democratic and the judicial processes.&nbsp;First, the judicial : human rights law has already become very seriously degraded in recent decades.&nbsp; Whereas the original idea behind human rights was that certain core elements of human dignity should be protected from abuse by overweening state power, now – as this latest case shows with terrible clarity – they are being used to make demands for more state power over people’s everyday lives (how much energy they should consume, and what kind of energy).&nbsp;Human rights law has therefore passed from the “negative freedom” defined by Isaiah Berlin – individuals should be allowed to live their lives without excessive interference from the state – to the collectivist and soon totalitarian “positive freedom” – my freedom is part of a larger rationalist social plan for the whole of humanity.&nbsp; Demands that the state refrain from acting have become demands that the state act.&nbsp; We have seen this for years in the demands for ever more exaggerated LGBT rights ; now it is extending into climate and energy policy.By the same token, the logic of international law is inverted by the attempt to impose climate policy from above.&nbsp; The fundamental logic of the United Nations Charter, and therefore of the International Court of Justice which is its guardian, is to preserve world peace by preventing states from attacking one another.&nbsp; State sovereignty, and the sovereign equality of states, are the legal concepts used to express the rule against wars of aggression.&nbsp;This, in turn, requires that states be independent and free from interference in their internal affairs.&nbsp;The logic is laid out with admirable clarity in <a href="https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text">Articles 2.1 and 2.7</a> of the UN charter.&nbsp; Yet to say now that climate policy should be an obligation in international law is to put at end to non-interference and sovereignty and to establish, in their place, world government.The democratic process is abused because discussions about climate policy should be in the parliamentary and public domain, not decided by judges who deliberate in secret.&nbsp; The role of the judge is to say what the law is, it is not to say what it should be.&nbsp; A government must weigh up the competing costs and benefits of a particular policy : cutting emissions will inevitably have some adverse effects even if it is alleged that other effects will be positive.&nbsp; A balance must be struck and it is the role of government to strike it because these matters concern taxation and spending, the core activities of government.&nbsp; A human rights claim, by contrast, invites the judges to look only at the person claiming that his rights have been violated, not at the overall policy issues which have absolutely nothing to do with the law.&nbsp; It is grotesque that the ECHR judges even accepted to hear this case – a fact which also shows how far they have strayed from their judicial role.Were the International Court of Justice to rule that states do have obligations under international law to implement climate policies, this would validate the idea that there is, or should be, a world government. &nbsp;Yet the international summits which agreed such policies are not democratic bodies : they are not elected and they are not accountable. &nbsp;To give the force of law to such political decisions, even in an advisory opinion, would be to consolidate the idea that policy can or should be made at world level. &nbsp;In the absence of any world democracy, or even any pretence at such, such a ruling would ride roughshod over national democracy and over the national sovereignty which is its essential pre-requisite. &nbsp;In other words, it would establish dictatorship.&nbsp;

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Climate activism leads to dictatorship

Forum for Democracy International

Leader of FVD and Member of Parliament of the Netherlands

David Engels is a Belgian historian and is a research professor at the Instytut Zachodni in Poznan.

Director of Forum for Democracy International

Diana West is an award-winning journalist and author of Death of the Grown-Up.

Max Denken is a Polish-American former university lecturer and TV producer, and since his retirement author of over 100 articles and one book.

Václav Klaus is the former president of the Czech Republic.

Member of the Executive Board of the Vaclav Klaus Institute.

Member of the European Parliament for FVD.

Eric van de Beek is an independent journalist.

Stefan Korte is a foreign policy adviser who worked with Bundestag members from the AfD.

Authors