An Empire in the Making

British author and political analyst Rodney Atkinson, B.A., M.SC., M.I.L., is founder of the Campaign for United Kingdom Conservatism, an organization committed to educating British citizens about the growing power of the European Union. On November 28, 2000, Gerald Flurry and Ron Fraser interviewed Mr. Atkinson. Following are excerpts.
 

Trumpet: When East and West Germany united, the very first foreign policy decision that the German government made was to formally recognize Croatia and Slovenia as nation-states separate from Yugoslavia. And there followed a complete destabilization of the Balkans. Can we draw any parallels between Balkan history over the past decade, subsequent to those events, and historical German aspirations for central, southeastern and Eastern Europe?

Atkinson: Well, I always say that the area of the world that proves conclusively that the theory that I propounded in Europe’s Full Circle is true is Yugoslavia. Because the German Secret Service was active, under Klaus Kinkle…from 1980 onwards. During the 1980s, they had hundreds of agents active in Yugoslavia, laying the groundwork for the breakup of Yugoslavia. They did the same thing before the First World War. They did the same thing before the Second World War, i.e., tried to undermine the Serbs…and promote their Catholic allies in Croatia and Slovenia, and utilize Muslim resentment in Albania and Kosovo against the Serbs. And, of course, they were extremely successful in doing that in the ’80s and ’90s.

One of the most striking parallels is that, as we know, Slovenia, Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo—effectively Albanians in Kosovo—are today—apart from Kosovo, which wants to be a separate state—all the others, are separate states. And this is an exact reprise of what happened during the 1940s, during the Second World War, when each of these ethnic groups was heavily pro-Nazi, pro-Italian fascist and anti-Serb, anti-Yugoslavia. And each of them had Baffen SS divisions—local natives organized and run by the German SS in units to fight the Serbs…. They rounded up hundreds of thousand of Serbs and massacred them in a concentration camp called Jasenovac, which most people have never heard of, because it was in Yugoslavia…. But 700,000 people were massacred there by Croatian fascists during the war. Ninety percent of them were Serbs, and they were massacred because they were Serb and because they were Orthodox…. And the other 10 percent were Jews and gypsies.

And of course, we also know that in 1989 and 1990 the first ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia was conducted after the Germans recognized Croatia, after the Croatians established a blatantly nationalistic constitution, which discriminated against Serbs. The first people to be ethnically cleansed were 40,000 Serbs from Croatia. The biggest ethnic cleansing was of about 500,000 Serbs from an area of Croatia…the border area, historically. And there are today about a million displaced Serbs. Of course there are other refugees as well, we know. But that is what’s happened today, and it is an exact parallel with what happened before the First World War and before and during the Second World War.

Trumpet: The Principality and Power of Europe by Adrian Hilton makes this statement about Margaret Thatcher: “Though such devious scheming may sound unacceptably Shakespearean in character, the reality of the plot to unseat Margaret Thatcher was corroborated by a publication sent to the offices of Intercessors for Britain in 1989, reporting the activities of the Bilderbergers, a group of industrialists, bankers and world politicians. A clandestine meeting in May of that year emphasized the need to bring down Mrs. Thatcher because of ‘her refusal to yield British sovereignty to the European superstate that is to emerge in 1992.’ It was in the autumn of that year that the first attempt to remove her was made, and within 18 months she was gone.”

Now there have been other authors, like Bernard Connolly, who have said the same thing—virtually saying that the European vision could not move forward unless she were moved out of the way. A major priority was to remove her from office. Do you agree with those statements?

Atkinson: Yes, I do. And I’m bound to say that some of the evidence for this comes from the United States, where certain groups have been infiltrating Bilderberg meetings over a long time…. [There were] two individuals who founded the Bilderberg group—one who hated the nation-state and the other who was a former Nazi intelligence officer. And this group is not a tight-knit group of conspirators setting out to destroy nations…. They’re the kind of people selected on the basis that they might say yes to international super-national corporatism, which is the foundation, of course, of the modern European Union and was, as I mentioned earlier, with Ford and General Motors, the foundation of their support for German and Italian structures of government during the 1930s and 1940s.

Now Mrs. Thatcher is a well-known and robust and instinctive fighter against such corporatism. She really was, when in office, too naïve, and she allowed too many individuals, who were not of her way of thinking, to take prominent positions in her government. And they, behind her back, signed all these various treaties which undermined British national sovereignty, under the guise of being all about free trade and cooperation. But in fact, of course, we know it was no such thing…. She woke up to what they’d done, in the late 1980s…. She stood up in Parliament and said, They want us to give up this, this and this; my answer is no, no, no. And that was the view of the vast majority of the British people, as it is today.

But, as you say, she was a thorn in the side of the multinational corporatists, of the Eurofanatic, of the social and liberal-democrat idea that the only way to stop nations fighting each other is to abolish the nations. It’s this crude, collectivist logic which undermines so many things in our internal economies, that they applied to the international field, and said that nation-states are dangerous, nationalism is dangerous. And of course, it wasn’t nationalism that caused Hitler to march all over Europe, it was supernationalism—he wanted an integrated Europe. And he saw, in that, great power, just like today Germany sees an integrated Europe and great power.

And they have found in Tony Blair, in the United Kingdom, our present prime minister, someone who shares that view—who has no strong principles. He is of a party of the left which has moved to the right. His predecessor, John Major, was a man of conservatism who moved to the left. And so both of them were not based on principle but on power and survival. And this is the kind of logic which made them very easy to tempt into the European Union’s structures. Mrs. Thatcher was not that type. She would not be integrated; she would not be cajoled. She would stand up and say no, no, no. And that was certainly the reason why many were successful in plotting and getting rid of her.

Trumpet: Mrs. Thatcher made this statement in October 1995 about the European Union: “You have not anchored Germany to Europe; you have anchored Europe to a newly dominant, unified Germany. In the end, my friends, you’ll find it will not work.”

Atkinson: I just wish that all this sort of thing had been said a long time ago…. But, in the meantime, all sorts of horrendous things have happened: We’ve had the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, we’ve had increasing activism of the European Court of Justice as it calls itself. We’ve had the excuse of various crises…the common agricultural crisis, the Yugoslav crisis. All these crises natural consequences of the ludicrous idea that you can have a superstate in Europe. But—each one of those crises was an enormous help to that superstate, because it could then say, Give us more power, we have to tackle this crisis. And the latest example of that is, following the Yugoslav crisis they want to have their own army—that’s another good example.

A friend of mine is a professor of economics. He was talking—about two years ago, just before the creation of the euro—to a former director of the Bundesbank, the German central bank. And he said to him, Well, you realize with this euro there could be a really great crisis here. This just doesn’t stack up, it doesn’t work. And this German said, Yes, that’s what we want: a crisis. So that gives you some idea of the mentality of the people you’re dealing with. They’re not idealists. You know, they aren’t democrats. They don’t want the best for the people today; they want the best for themselves tomorrow and next year and a hundred years’ time. Their aim is power and historical destiny—very similar of course to the words used in Nazi Germany—historical destiny.

Trumpet: If you had to point to the singular most dangerous element of the European Union, that which would have the most detrimental affect on the Anglo-Americans, what would that be?

Atkinson: Well…one is undoubtedly what’s just happening: the establishment of this European rapid reaction force as an excuse. It’s the beneficiary, this idea…of Germany, through its secret service, undermining and destroying Yugoslavia. That led to a crisis. Then they say, Okay, we’ve got a crisis; we’ve got to have an army to deal with it. We can’t rely on the Americans to come and help us. And that rapid reaction force is, and is meant to be, an embryo European army….

And that means the de-coupling of America from Europe. That is the aim. That is probably the biggest strategic danger to you. Not least because that war in Yugoslavia has alienated the whole of Eastern Europe: all the former Soviet satellites. It has alienated the Russians, it’s alienated the Slavs, it’s alienated all the Orthodox…. And of course, it’s alienated China, because of the bombing of its embassy in Belgrade.

Now, those powers are too weak at the moment to mount a threat to German Europe or to America. But I think the Rubicon for many of them has been crossed. And far from opening our arms to democratic nationhood and genuine free-market capitalism, we’ve given them a slap in the face—a historic slap in the face in Yugoslavia. And they won’t trust us. And they certainly won’t trust German Europe. But in the short term, Putin and Kostunica in Yugoslavia will make nice noises to the West, because they need to build up their countries again. But in the long and the medium term, I think what we’ve done is given an excuse for a new major international conflict. In other words, the very time that we don’t need de-coupling of America from Europe, because of these pressures, that is the very time that this creation of an…embryo European army may well lead to just that de-coupling. That’s the strategic defense problem that I would point to.

Trumpet: European parliamentarian Otto von Habsburg said, “The [European] Community is living largely by the heritage of the Holy Roman Empire, though the great majority of the people who live by it don’t know by what heritage they live.” Obviously, if people don’t understand it, it seems to me that allows for a great amount of deceit, of maybe doing certain things that people are not aware of. Could you explain and give us a little background on what the heritage of the Holy Roman Empire is?

Atkinson: Well, Christianity is not the heritage of the Holy Roman Empire. Christianity is the heritage of the Christian church, which goes back long before the establishment of the Vatican and long before the Holy Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire is the thing that really brings together German power and Vatican religion…. Charlemagne…was crowned emperor in Rome in the year 800 a.d. And today there is a Charlemagne Prize, named after him, for those who’ve contributed most to the integration of the European Union—in other words, to the destruction of the democratic nations of Europe, to put it bluntly…. Tony Blair, last year, received the Charlemagne Prize. Clinton did as well. You’ll find there’s a strong link between those who attend Bilderberger meetings and those that get the Charlemagne Prize…. It’s a Catholic pan-Europe movement which has always wanted to unite and form a modern version of the Holy Roman Empire.

But of course, the founder of that empire, Charles the Great, Charlemagne, was himself—all right, he was Christian—but he was the kind of Christian you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark night! He massacred thousands of people because they wouldn’t convert to Christianity…. And there’s one particular case where 4,000 prisoners of war were massacred by Charlemagne in about 750 a.d….

Christianity by the sword was his idea. And today we see the Holy Roman Empire by the back door.

Trumpet: Recently, Lord Tebbit, previously a member of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet, stated that if the conservatives gain office in the next British election, he believes as does Margaret Thatcher that Britain will be put out of the European Union. Do you see a prospect of this happening and, if so, how soon?

Atkinson: It’s very difficult to say. I mean, when such an evil has been built up over a long period, it takes those of us who are exposing that evil a long time. I’ve been doing this for 10 or 12 years now. When we started there wasn’t a single newspaper on our side. The vast majority of people accepted it as a common market of free nations cooperating with each other—when, of course, it was nothing of the kind. But that’s what they’d been told and that’s what they thought they were voting for. And to reverse that and, in a sense, also give this corrupt structure time to disintegrate internally—who knows how long that will take? But when it does go, it will go with a bang.

And when opinion in Britain goes, it goes with a bang. Because nothing that has happened in the past 30 years was ever done with the approval of the British people. It was done despite the British people. They were never asked a question to which those asking thought the answer might be no. They were always asked questions to which they thought they could get the answer yes. The referendums on European treaties, they were manipulated. The government and the “yes” campaign spent millions more than the “no” could—even though the nos represented the majority of people at the beginning of the campaign.

And by about four or five treaties since 1972, by the activism of the European Court and by eating away at the veto of each sovereign nation, they have largely achieved what they set out to do. But of course, the more they got towards achieving it, the less popular they got. The more obvious it became to people what was happening. And the euro is a very good example…. This takes time to penetrate the public mind. In Britain it’s further along the road than anywhere else. I think it could go very quickly.