STEVE PIECZENIK TALKS

Brexit: The 21st Century Battle of Waterloo: Britain Vanquishes France Once Again!

On June 23, 2016, a major battle was won by the British people. They decided to leave the constricted tentacles of the French-inspired EU.I have entitled this historical event the “21^st Century Battle of Waterloo.”

Why?

History possesses a sardonic sense of irony. When I applauded this long awaited Brexit phenomenon, I was mindful of a painting which I had seen in Bruxelles,Belgium when I was a teenager-“The Battle Of Waterloo” by William Sadler. Despite the dire warnings of imminent disaster from the miscreant politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, I have encouraged this break-up of the EU for well over ten years.

The EU was a complete fabrication of a laggard group of so-called ‘French intellectuals’ who presumed for no reason other than fear that a European Union had to be created in order to co-opt/impede the belligerence of a post-WWII Germany.

The French,as usual, fell into their own intellectual solipsism, having forgotten how their Corsican [faux French] Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated for the last time at the Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815.The irony of such a magnificent defeat by the brilliant Irish/English Duke of Wellington and his trusted Prussian ally, the Prince of Wohlstatt, Gebhard Lebrecht von Blucher, echoes through the past 201 years to the present times.

Exactly five days before Brexit was initiated on June 23, 2016, England had defeated France on June 18, 1815. Furthermore, the Battle of Waterloo occurred in present day Bruxelles, Belgium, where the presumptive headquarters of the ephemeral EU  has been located for the past several decades.

My analogy pays homage to the writer/philosopher, George Santayana’s dictum: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Remember how many times I would reiterate the fact that France could not,would not, nor was ever capable of matching,competing, or more importantly, co-opting the more powerful indigenous economic forces of the juggernaut called Germany.

WWI and WWII demonstrated that a defeated Germany could easily conquer any armies except those of Lord Wellington and Stalin’s Soviet Army at Stalingrad.Britain correctly decided along with Queen Elizabeth’s blessing that England had to re-enter the 21st Century with a clean slate. Britain, an economic powerhouse, had to determine whether it could go it alone without the encumbrances of the southern tier countries: Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece.

In many ways, the primary dynamic of the 21st century is not globalization, but ‘devolution’.Power will be redistributed from a nation state back to its geopolitical components.

Spain was the country which I targeted in my novels (Tom Clancy’s Op Center)- and blogs as one of the first countries that would fragment into the provinces of Catalonia, Basque, Valencia, etc.That shift from centralized power might further fragment Britain into Scotland, Wales, and so on.

The major issue of our times is that the nation state in the Information Age is antiquated. Twenty years ago, in the Tom Clancy’s NET FORCE series, I postulated/predicted that the internet would create new viable political/economic entities like “Cybernation” and “Cyber-Terrorism” with the concomitant suppressive powers of “Net Force” [read NSA, Cyber Command, etc.].The future has a certain inherent logic to its evolution.

The brave people of Britain spoke with their votes and determined that they wanted to leave an antiquated, disruptive entity: the EU.In November, we, Americans, will have to determine our future. Do we want to stick with the past, or do we enter the future [Trump]?

George Santayana wrote the following:

“We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.”