Out: Brexit. In: Polexit

Good post.
Sounds like what the USA has with the United Nations... lots of cost... lots of hot air... very little value.

 

But they are all elected by folks with a common flag, a common history, generally a common language and most importantly. one common law... the US Constitution. My dad and mom were both Army Officers in WWII, There aren't any folks from Berlin or Kyoto in the US Congress. I often wonder how Brits feel about Germans making their rules or how France feels about Italians making their rules when their parents and grandparents were killing each other. Americans all have George Wshington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and the Star Spangled Banner in common. France, Germany, Italy, Spain, etc haven't had anything like that.

 

The EU has its own flag. The history of England is common with that of Germany; the Royal Family have German descent from Queen Victoria's time. The UK had a veto on any rules. The USA existed while the Texans and New Yorkers were killing each other. The countries in the EU are just as close (or far apart) as the New Yorkers were with those of California 150 years ago. California is Spain, New York is UK. The people in the EU are more closely related than the people in the US. The US Constitution is not US law - each state interpret it differently. The EU is just a few decades old, the US centuries old. Is the US the same now as it was after being 30 years old?


PS I am British

 

yeah....it's complicated.....I think you have to look at the evolution of the EU...from the early 1950s when the nascent EU was called something like...what was it the Iron and Steel Trade confederation...??? Something like that anyway...the whole point was that there was this idea that if nations traded together without let or hinderance this would lead to a better world and we would all sit by the fire and sing songs and not beat the living crap out of ourselves because nuclear weapons had arrived and people were shitscared of another European war. So fast forward to 1979 when this organisation had morphed into the European Economic Community (EEC). This is the period when the UK was an economic basket case.. I mean we had troubles with trades unions and crap management and all sorts of loss making Nationalised Industries....Thatcher thought the best way that the UK could develop was inside a free trade zone - which is exactly what the EEC was merely a free trade area. In 1979 the UK had a referendum and well...my predecessors voted to join...and yes it was a great idea. On the face of it why would you not join!

The problems started when Jacques Delores the French Prime Minister wanted to start integrating all the EEC participants into not only an economic partnership but a political partnership as well....his idea was the each member state would agree to a certain amount of sovereignty being given to the European Commission. So the direction of travel was not just economic integration but now political and social and legal as well...this was Kantian Cosmopolitanism writ large which to be fair was always the elephant in the room....ever so slowly over decades little bits of legislation were enacted within the EU legal framework that took away tiny bits of each nations national laws...the subscriptions became larger and larger and in true Kantian fashion the distributions of wealth want from the large to the small. This is when alarm bells started sounding in the UK....Britain and the British have never really been good little Europeans we joined because it was a free trade area...I mean in the past Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last five hundred years: to create a disunited Europe...we've fought with the Dutch against the Spanish with the Germans against the French, with the French and the Italians against the Germans and with the French against the Germans and Italians.... an admiral strategy of divide and rule and then that all changed now we have to be part of the EU dream.

One day we woke up to the fact that we had basically lost a significant portion of control over the laws and legal basis for the UK's existence...various UK Governments had knowingly handed control over to not only the European Commission but to all the organs of law and power within the EU. It was a coup d'état by salami tactics over decades.

 

Fantastic perspective. Thank you so much!
In America we found out that we couldn't legislate success, morality, teamwork etc., when we outlawed booze during Prohibition. All we did was kill a lot of people and set up the groundwork for the Mafia in America. It takes a change in attitude, not just law, to establish teamwork and success.

I often reflect on how Britain and the USA fought bitterly in our Revolution and just years later it got so bad that the UK burned our capital. Some years later I made friends with a British General who Commanded the training center at Salisbury Plain when I was helping build Salisbury Plain into the kind of training facility we have at Fort Irin. The General visited us in California and, at his request, I set up a visit to our USS Stennis aircraft carrier. He was treated like royalty and had a great time. He turned to me and said that we must be proud of such a ship. I laughed a bit and said he should be too, since we were his "children". It was a silly thing to say but we laughed. I couldn't help but see how our countries had gone from bitter enemies to close friends. And it wasn't done with legislation. It was done with time, healing, working together and the brotherhood that comes from fighting side by side. Neither Britain nor America lost anything in establishing this relationship. But we both sure gained A LOT.

 

Imber...?

 

Ooops... Fort Irwin. The National Training Center. Outside of Barstow, California

 

Hi mate, no I meant when you were in the UK...I was based down in Tidworth for a while which is part of the larger UK establishment around the Salisbury training area within which was the urban warfare training area called Imber village....just wondered if that was what you were working on?

 

.

 

I was at Salisbury Plain to help integrate attack helicopters into the training scenarios. At the time, British MoD had established a contract with Westland Helicopters to manufacture Apaches under license from Boeing. The whole thing kind of blew up after a few months when Westland determined it didn't have the ability to carry out the contract. The Brits ended up buying the birds from Boeing directly. By then I had moved on to something else. That was 1998-99 as I remember.

I did lots of work with "urban warfare", not with the Brits but with the US Army where it's called MOUT (Military Operations in Urban Terrain) and the Marines, who refer to it as MOBUA (Military Operations in Built Up Areas). I also helped US Special Operations develop a "reconfigurable" urban training site at the "House of Horrors" at Ft Bragg. One of the more interesting challenges was to develop a MILES (laser training system) variant that could "shoot" through walls. Fun stuff.