Nigel Farage: NATO has kept peace in Europe - "not a bunch of overpaid bureaucrats"

The New Yorker's piece on Nigel Farage - who recently attended a reception in New York - is a must read:

“I’m not anti-European at all. I’m married to a German, for goodness’ sake, so I know the dangers of a German-dominated household.” But, he said, “The idea that we should take all these different countries in Europe, force them together against their democratic will, and put them under the control of people like Herman Van Rompuy is, frankly, beyond belief.

These are very, very dangerous, bad people,” he went on. “They want to stop nation-state democracy.” The consequence, in his view, will likely be violent revolution and political extremism. (A few days later, after hearing that the E.U. had won the Nobel, he said, “I thought it was a joke. I thought it must be April the 1st. The timing is absolutely bizarre. And, anyway, what has kept the peace in Europe since 1945 is not a bunch of overpaid bureaucrats but, rather, nato, with no small contribution by the United States.”)

“Did you see Merkel today?” he asked. Angela Merkel had visited Greece, prompting demonstrations and riots. “I mean, how insensitive. Is it any wonder they all turned out wearing swastikas on their arms and giving Nazi salutes? This project, which was supposed to make the countries of Europe love each other, is actually making the countries of Europe hate each other.”

He described a meeting he had with Merkel last year, in which he suggested that everyone would be happier if the Greeks left the euro—the Greeks would be free to default on their debts, re-adopt the drachma, and escape “the economic prison” of the euro zone; and the Germans would no longer have to contemplate bailing them out, in perpetuity. Merkel (who, he said, “outside of the public glare, is a completely different person from the one you see on the TV: she is even more miserable in private”) explained that if the Greeks pulled out, other countries would, too, and that would doom “our European dream.”

“What Merkel is saying,” Farage went on, “is that if the whole of Greece goes bankrupt, if everybody in Greece is starving, if they’re all homeless, that doesn’t matter, we have to preserve our dream. In pursuing something that is clearly a failed economic model, we’re doing just what the Communists did in Soviet Russia.”

Read the entire article here