Eastern Europe holds the key to save Europe | Voice of Europe
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Wherever we travel in Europe, we are surrounded by beauty. It might not feel like it, if we are in an industrialised area, but even in the fires of industry, beauty lives.
Source: Eastern Europe holds the key to save Europe
There are some who claim that there is no such thing as a European culture, a definable European-ness that connects all people of European heritage – whether on the homeland, the European Continent, or in the European Diaspora of North America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. This article opens with a joyous refutation of that silly notion, a paean to what it means to be European:
"This beauty permeates everything. It connects us all, from the Cypriots in the South to the Scandinavian Arctic Circle, the furthest coast of Ireland to the Russian borders. It smells of Suquet de Peix. It smells of pierogi. It smells of beef with gravy, cannelloni, haggis and kryddsill. It smells of home. You can feel it when you walk the streets of the nations of Europe. You experience it when you are far from your own nation and are suddenly struck by a curious sense of deja-vu. That intangible feeling of belonging; though we are in a foreign land. In industrial Rhineland, the shores of Las Islas Baleares and on the streets of Budapest, the same strands of history are woven.
"This is the beauty of our shared European Culture. under this broad term lies our heritage, inextricably linked by centuries of shared fate and oceans of spilt blood. It sounds like Gorecki. It sounds like Debussy and Brahms and Elgar. It sounds like Iron Maiden, cutting-edge techno from Berlin, flamenco and Disco-Polo. It sounds like the silent fjords of Norway at midnight. Our connected history, brothers and sisters of Europe, is deep and dark as the earth beneath our feet, beneath our city streets.
"Though we all live in different ways, there is more that connects us than separates. The roots that spread to Christianity and the Roman Empire persist today, blended with the even older pagan faiths that we remember today only in ritual. Our art is a kinship, clearly identifiable as European in origin, as is our schools of philosophy, science and literature. Together, our nations are the current manifestation of the most successful civilisation in history.
"Europeans, bonded together by history and blood, have made this culture. We bear the proud duty and responsibility to care for it, in the name of our ancestors and in trust for our descendants. Of course, we are not perfect. Our mastery of war brought such carnage to our continent again and again- but without these horrors, would we be in such a fraternal position now? More, our bellicose ancestors are glorious examples of what it means to fight for what you believe in, to fight for your homelands.
"Though the self-serving bureaucrats in Bruxelles claim that their red-tape machine is in service of Europe, it is in our hearts that Europe lives."
Yet now, under the bureaucrats, plutocrats, globalists, and cultural Marxists of Brussels, "The sum of our European experience has been reduced to a blue banner with stars that represents nothing about us. Centuries of competition and conflict, betrayal, alliances and sectarian hatred, age after age of struggle" are seen to be of nothing worth.
Only in the East is there meaningful resistance to the programmed future of the militant socio-political Left: relentlessly multicultural, atheistic (though inexplicably, and with unintended irony, welcoming of Islam – which would gleefully behead, stone, or lob from the tops of tall buildings each and all of their Leftist admirers), iconoclastic and amoral.
But in the East, among the Visegrad nations – and now, perhaps Austria may be coming around, as well – there is still resistance. There is still pride in their European heritage. There is awareness of the lie under which much of the West has been living, since the fall of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact:
"We can see the lie when we walk in European countries that are still proud of themselves, ironically they are invariably countries that have suffered terrible times at the hands of totalitarians. Strange it is for a Westerner like me to look eastwards with envy at the people of the East, so long the derided and unwanted...
"Today the nations of Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and too few others, it is these victims of Communism who lead us by example on what it means to be European... these nations see ours, and reject the false dawn of a multicultural society that belongs to no-one. Those of us who live in the former ‘free’ Europe – take note. Our brothers and sisters in the East have seen what is happening to us before."
Can the nations of Eastern (and, perhaps, central) Europe – by their actions, and by their example – save Europe? They can – if the rest of Europe heeds the call, and the Europeans of the diaspora with them. We need to remember who we are!
"We are the inheritors of a culture that stretches back millennia. This is a great honour and responsibility, to curate our world for the generations to come. We are not merely individuals, with our singular travails and worries. We are Europe. We are a generation in a line of many, whose sons and daughters will, in turn, define what it means to be People of the West...
"Our culture is forged in the crucible of the wars of our ancestors. It has been fragmented and sold by fools and charlatans with no concept of who we are. It is up to us to reclaim it, for ourselves, for the future. For Europe."