ONE MAN'S VIEW

When the USSR collapsed it was believed that once again, for the first time since the Soviet overthrow of Tsarist Russia, Europe was united. Far from it. The concept of a united Europe is still a distant dream.

The European Union is made up of 27 nations. However, there are 47 countries in Europe to which can be added European Russia.

An irony is that many of these European lands are historically and culturally more European than many Western European nations. Their peoples are shocked at what they see as the multi-racial cosmopolitan decadence of the West.

I was stunned when years ago, a German-American friend who I knew was passionately anti-Communist, said he welcomed the Soviet Union’s occupation of Eastern Germany. He explained that eventually the Soviet regime would collapse. Then, the former occupied states, held in a time warp, would be much as they were before the Second World War. “However,” he added, “much of the liberal West will by then have poisoned its own roots.”

What gets my goat are the difficulties and formidable barriers fellow Europeans encounter when they wish to visit the Western sector. The barbed wire and frontier posts still divide us. The fact that the European Union is governed by unelected bankocrats does not help.

I have many Russian friends and a Ukrainian wife. Nadia’s nation is the largest nation in Europe. Our locked out family hold our values and in fact cherish and nurture them more than we do. We could learn much from them and the European Russians. However, you wouldn’t believe the expensive mind-numbing procedures Eastern Europeans and Russians go through to spend even a holiday in our half of Europe. 

Spare me guff about their wanting to leach our benefits. Russia’s economy and much of the former Eastern Bloc’s nations economies are doing far better than ours.  Recently, there was disbelief from a Latvian and a Ukrainian when I told them about the extremes of poverty and unemployment here. Yes, ignorance of each others countries is another thing but that can be saved for another article. What we desperately need is a truly free Europe much as it was before it was bricked in by politicians.