STRANGE STATESMEN
As the supposed ‘doomsday scenario’ of a No-Deal Brexit is seemingly staved off until the actual Doomsday, SD TUCKER asks whether this is a case of what doesn’t kill EU only making EU stronger.
Doomsday delayed SD TUCKER
Predictably, my last Strange Statesman entry dealing with Brexit (FT378:52-55) was already out of date by the time it was printed, with the people’s alleged ‘representatives’ in Westminster conspiring to delay Britain’s escape from the EU from its originally scheduled date of 29 March until… well, who knows? Possibly it won’t now even happen at all – a narrative of betrayal which fuelled Nigel Farage’s sensational win in the European Parliament elections in May, with his newly-formed Brexit Party topping the polls in spite of it only having being formed a few weeks beforehand. By rights, you would think the attempted reversal of Brexit by the political class, whether temporary or otherwise, should have dealt quite a blow to the evangelical religious conspiracy theorists we looked at last time who had rejoiced back in 2016 when Britain voted to free herself from the hellishly restraining red tape of the Satanic Brussels bureaucrats and their supposed secret leader, the AntiChrist. But is this really so? Not necessarily. Surprisingly, the delay to our leaving the EU may only act to strengthen such people’s convictions …
The basic template of the millenarian End Times myth holds that the current period of human history is also the last. Christ will soon facilitate the bodily removal of all True Believers from the Earth in an event known as the Rapture, leaving the rest behind to be ruled over by the Antichrist, who will initially claim to be heralding an era of world peace (just as, you might argue, transnationalist organisations like the EU often claim to do). However, this turns out to be a false promise, and seven years of so-called ‘Tribulation’ then follow, in which wars, natural disasters and hideous supernatural events plague mankind, culminating in the long-promised Battle of Armageddon, after which Christ descends from Heaven, defeats the Antichrist, initiates the Final Judgement, and oversees a new 1,000-year era of true peace in both Heaven and Earth from upon His blessed throne within the New Jerusalem.
You can tell the EU will be the institution through which Antichrist will come to rule temporarily over mankind, extreme evangelicals argue, as Eurocrats have left symbolic stamps of his evil all around them.
Greek and Italian two-Euro coins carry an image of Europa riding the bull, as do some Euro banknotes and EU residency permits. In Greek myth, Europa was a princess abducted and raped by Zeus in the shape of a giant white bull – it was her daughter-in-law Pasiphae who is later said to have slept with another bull herself, before falling pregnant with the minotaur. It is from Europa that the term ‘Europe’ is derived, and her enforced tupping by the King of Olympus is often viewed as a symbolic ‘founding myth’ for the entire continent. But have Europa’s modern-day descendants – the demonic EU – now given birth to a second freakish monster?
Biblical literalists prefer to say that the bull is really the Beast of Revelation, and the woman riding upon her back Angela Merkel, AKA the Whore of Babylon – or ‘Mystery Babylon the Great, Mother of Harlots and of the abominations of the Earth’ to give the Whore her full title. This is significant, as Revelation speaks of the ‘Mark of the Beast’, which everyone during the coming Reign of Antichrist will have to bear in order to buy or sell goods – including food. It follows that this ‘Mark’ is thus the dreaded Euro currency, and the associated documents of EU bureaucracy without which it is impossible to do business within the Eurozone. Thus, to be a part of the EU project is to be forced to swear effective allegiance to the Antichrist and his New Brussels Babylon – if you don’t, you’ll literally be left to starve, as the unfortunate people of Greece so recently discovered.
1
In addition, the careless whispers of various Eurocrats down the years have accidentally let the cat out of the bag. Former Belgian PM Paul-Henri Spaak, one of the driving forces behind the whole idea of a United Europe, is supposed to have said the following in 1949: “What we want [to lead us] is a man of sufficient stature to hold the allegiance of all people, and to lift us out of the economic morass into which we are sinking [in a shattered post-WWII austerity Europe]. Send us such a man, and be he God or the Devil, we will receive him.” However, Spaak was clearly only speaking metaphorically, and may actually never have said any such thing as the quote appears apocryphal.
DANIEL IN THE LIARS’ DEN
Evangelicals enjoy studying apocrypha, though, although they prefer the Book of Daniel which, it may surprise you to know, features several coded references to Brexit. In Daniel 7, there is a description of the titular Prophet’s dreams, in
which a 10-horned Beast arises, representing 10 kings who form a powerful alliance – or, in modern terms, 10 EU member-states who gang up to dominate the continent.
But the EU currently has 28 member-states, perhaps falling to
27 if Brexit takes place. Possibly
‘10’ is used by Daniel simply as a generic term for ‘many’. Or, it could mean that some 18 member-states, not simply Britain, are ultimately going to break away from the clutches of the EU Antichrist. In Daniel 2, during the time of the ancient Jewish captivity in Babylon under King Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel becomes chief interpreter of the monarch’s own dreams, one of which involves a large statue whose 10 toes – or member-states, corresponding to the Beast of Babylon’s 10 horns – are made of iron and clay, two materials which do not cohere very well. To Eurosceptic evangelicals, the clay represents democracy and the more Eurosceptic nations, such as Britain, whereas the iron represents the harshness of totalitarian EU dictatorship and the more Europhile lands like Germany and France. As Eurosceptic blocs like the Eastern European Visegrad Group and Italy under Matteo Salvini increasingly begin to assert their independence from Brussels, many millenarians anticipate that the 10 toes of the EU will inevitably splay apart and drop off, one by one, as if the Beast has contracted a bad case of political leprosy.
The whole situation is expressed by one online US End Timer thus: “Alone, not a single EU nation is a world power. Together, they are the world’s greatest economic power. Combined, their military spending is second only to the United States…
It’s a revived Roman Empire made up of weak and strong nations. And this is what the Bible says will exist just before Jesus returns… A Divided Alliance, Loosely Held Together – The global empire described by Daniel will be divided (Daniel 2:41). It will struggle to hold itself together, just as iron and clay struggle to hold themselves together (Daniel 2:43). Do we see this type of alliance when we look at the EU? Absolutely! … Brexit is only the latest example of the EU’s struggle to stay together ‘just as iron and clay don’t hold together’… The UK vote to exit from the EU is just the latest event in a process that signals the rise of a global empire. It’s yet another sign Jesus is coming!”
2 Confusingly, therefore, Brexit can be interpreted in two ways. On one hand, the Leave vote could be welcomed
THE MARK OF THE BEAST IS THE DREADED EURO CURRENCY
unconditionally as a righteous blow against Babylon. But isn’t it also prophesied that Babylon’s reign must grow stronger before Christ can return to defeat His arch-enemy? In this case, Brexit becomes recast not as an eschaton, or necessary catalyst of imminent Apocalypse, but as a katechon, an equally necessary delaying agent of that very same Apocalypse. In his Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, St Paul explains that, prior to the Antichrist finally revealing himself, it is necessary for someone or something that restrains him to be removed. This katechon has generally been interpreted as relating somehow to the original Roman Empire… but, to many evangelical hardliners Brussels is naught but Rome reborn. Brexit greatly restrains the modern Antichrist by diluting Brussels’s diplomatic heft and spendingpower, so before this evil being can truly take over, this dangerous existential crisis for the EU has first of all to arise – and then be stopped.
Therefore, I predict, if Remainers do indeed manage to engineer a full Reverse-Brexit – which the Lib Dems won plenty of votes by promising to do in their recent Euro elections campaign – then, to certain minds, all they will have done is fulfilled yet another biblical prophecy, and transformed the Brexit katechon into an eschaton, thereby bringing the much-desired (to them) End of the World just that little bit closer. Consider the following line from Revelation: “And I saw one of [the Beast’s] heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed; and all the world wondered after the Beast… And [seeing this] they worshipped the Beast, saying, ‘Who is like unto the Beast? Who is able to make war with him?’” Not the soon-to-be-departed Theresa May, evidently; Mrs Thatcher’s famous handbag-swinging to get us our hard-won 1980s EU budgetrebate concession is now, like all such dragon-slaying, a lost art.
If Britain ultimately remains in the EU, whether literally or in all but name, then the Evil Brussels Empire will only appear all the stronger, won’t it? Nobody will dare to try and break free again after that. But, to contradict Nietzsche, that which does not kill it only apparently makes the EU stronger; any reversal of Brexit, by making the Second Rome strong again, would merely usher in its looming future defeat by Christ. To the millenarian mind, just as to the twin Prophets Daniel and Johnny Cash, thanks to Brexit the writing is now up there on the wall for the EU one way or another; NeoBabylon has been weighed in the balance by God and found wanting, with Juncker’s kingdom built upon the Brussels sand.
NOTES
1 www.thenewfederalist.eu/Europa-and-the-bullThe-significance-of-the-myth-in-modern-Europe; www.thenewfederalist.eu/Europa-and-the-bullThe-significance-of-the-myth-in-modern-Europe, 4280; https://thewildvoice.org/mystery-babyloneuropean-union/
2 www.raptureready.com/2016/07/28/is-brexitmentioned-in-bible-prophecy-by-britt-gillette/ A detailed study of the eschatological EU symbology mentioned in this article appears in Dr Steve Knowles’ 2018 paper ‘Brexit, Babylon and Prophecy: Semiotics of the End Times’, online at www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/9/12/396/htm
SD TUCKER would like to turn his research into Brussels-related conspiracy theories into a fulllength study; if any potential publishers are interested, he can be contacted via FT.