Wire Yed wrote:
So Mugwump of you had to be devils advocate and argue the positives of the EU what would they be?
Personally i can freely admit there are many things i have agreed with and have no issue with but democracy is sacrosanct and trumps all. Even if it is an illusion of democracy, I'd rather live in that than a blatant dictatorship.
Democracy is just another shell game. Whilst these days its virtues are held to be self-evident what most people don't realise is this idea is a relatively new phenomenon.
Anyone who has read the works of Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides (especially) etc. knows that the Greeks very quickly realised that Democracy is a mug's game which is wide open to demagoguery and oligarchy. Most of the Greek city states flat out REFUSED to become democratic and literally had it forced upon them at the tip of an Athenian spear.
If Democracy was such a great thing why is it Athens lay in ruins soon after instituting it? Why is it Plato (widely considered the greatest philosopher who ever lived) had nary a good word to say about it and blamed it for the death of his hero, Socrates?
Look back through history and you'll find far kinder things said about the Spartan political system. Indeed, the Spartan model was considered preferable right up to the arrival of Hitler.
I'm not saying I concur with this opinion, BTW. I'm just pointing out.
The word you should really be looking for is "Freedom". Without wishing to get into a very long and complicated discussion about the nature of "Freedom" what I will say is that Democracy and Freedom are NOT the same thing.
Take the parliamentary system. The notion that someone can represent YOUR interests in addition to the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker as well as BAE systems down the road is patently absurd. Representative democracy was perhaps a good idea when it took a week to travel down to London and back via carriage. But this is the
Information Age we are living in. When information travels at the speed of light there is no need for any MPs. We could all vote electronically and that would be a much fairer system and certainly more representative.
What are the "positives" of the EU? It's a tough question because I am not part of the class of people the EU was created primarily to benefit. The truth is you and I are practically irrelevant to any decision which will come out of this vote.
As long as we remain at each other's throats over non-issues such as this we will have no say in our future. It reminds me of endless squabbles I've heard between ostensible "Labour" and "Tory" supporters who are too stupid to see that for a very long time now (perhaps it's always been this way in terms of trend) the
worst government is always the next one (or at least for those people who are part of the "99%").Ever since the Bolshevik revolution the direction has been toward greater unification rather than self-determination and Britain just isn't strong enough to buck this trend. Which means no matter what the likes of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Farage etc. say it's not on the table.
