"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" (George Santayana).

It has been some months since I have written anything on human rights and the homeschooling situation in Europe and the world. There are many reasons for this but one has been to sit back to study and digest in greater depth the trends not only in the European Union, currently the most guilty of abuses against the homeschooling community (and in particular Germany and Sweden), but also in the United States, traditionally the land of liberty but now increasingly imitating the ways of the European Gulag. Homeschoolers there, who in number vastly outnumber the rest of the global home-educating community in all other countries combined, is clearly being targeted by the anti-libertarian, neo-Marxist gunslingers of the pseudo-liberal Obama régime. What is perhaps the most amazing feature of the German, Swedish and the United States governments is that though they pretend to represent different wings of the political spectrum - Merckel's and Rheinfeld's "conservative" and Obama's "liberal" régimes, respectively - the truth is (to borrow one of Nigel Farrage's favourite sayings) "you couldn't put a cigarette paper between them", they're so similar.

Something mighty strange has happened in the West - all the governments and their political parties are looking increasingly alike. If I had been a 'remote viewer' back in the 1970's looking, for example, at the current British conservative-liberal Cameron-Clegg régime, I would have concluded that it was just another Labour or Social Democratic Party. Indeed my first reaction upon arriving in Norway in 1988 was noting how similar and virtually indistinguishable all the political parties were. I couldn't tell who was right or left.

I have come to the conclusion now that nearly all mainstream political parties in the West (with the exception of the so-called "populist" or libertarian parties who believe in national sovereignty and individual freedom - like the UK Independence Party) have mutated into cooperating factions of totalitarian, anti-libertarian Marxism - "nationalist" (fascist), "conservative", "liberal", "social democratic" and far-left "revolutionary" (communist) variants of the Marxisr paradigm. This means that in reality the authentic freedom-loving conservative, liberal and social democrat movements have been all but wiped out even if there are authentic followers to be found in the various anti-libertarian counterfeits, as illustrated in the table below:

One of the surest barometers identifying whether a contemporary political party is authentically libertarian or a counterfeit totalitarian variety is in the way it treats families and homeschoolers. No mainstream political party in Germany or Sweden now recognises the legitimacy of homeschooling and though parties in other countries like Great Britain are forced to pay lip-service to it because of the long tradition of homeschooling there, we know that, as with the American Democrats, it has been - and is being - targeted for removal. The previous Labour Party's Badman Report was an attempt to start that process. Covertly autocratic political parties in those countries with a longer tradition of libertarianism like Britain know it can only be removed gradually by first regulating it and then outright banning it because of the popular backlash sudden banning would cause, until such a time as the people have been conditioned sufficiently to meekly accept whatever the government says because it is supposedly "in their best interests", that interest invariably being so-called "security". It's just a matter of time before homeschoolers are viewed as "potential terrorists" as part of the Marxist strategy of demonising anything that could be remotely construed as promoting free thought.

Why do these politicians who claim to love democracy want to regulate and then ban homeschooling? Because they are statist anti-libertarians who want Marxist conformity to be the social and political rule. They are the new global religious cult. They know - as both Lenin and Hitler preached - that if you can get full control of education that within one generation you can get control of the minds of the people through classroom indoctrination. Then you have the whole of society in your pocket. The only reason homeschooling is intolerable to the totalitarian mind-set is because they don't want people in society who can think for themeselves and challenge the status quo. Their kind of "democracy" can only work when everyone is thinking alike and they can manipulate the outcome of any democratic process, as they did in the former USSR. Which is why, as I have said numerous times before, that democracy without liberty always leads to totalitarianism. Then it isn't true democracy at all - it's the communist counterfeit version of it.

America and Britain remain comparitively free countries for only as long as homeschooling and the family are left alone. When homeschooling is banned, as it was in Germany (by Hitler) and in Sweden (by the current régime), totalitarianism reigns. But unfortunately, as far as the European Union is concerned, moving from a country like Germany (where homeschooling is banned) to one like France (where it is not) does not guarantee a homeschooling family protection, as the Wunderlich family of Germany discovered to their horror when they left their homeland for France to homeschool in peace and liberty, as they supposed. On 6 October 2009 two police officers and two social workers snatched the children. For four years Wunderlichs moved from country to country looking for for a place where they could freely homeschool. And although they were finally able to find refuge from persecution in France, they were unable to find work, and in 2012 they returned to Germany. A care order was placed on the children by the German authorities which forced them to attend state school by day but were allowed to return home in the evening. And then yesterday a SWAT team descended on this model family, kidnapped the children, and handed them over to German government psychiatrists for "evaluation" [1] in a manner reminiscent of the horrific kidnapping by armed police of Domenic Johansson from a Turkish airliner in Sweden. [2]

This means that refugee homeschoolers are unsafe throughout in the European Union even if homeschooling is legal in the country where refuge has been sought. And one lesson has been learned brutally by the Wunderlich family which other homeschoolers must make note of: Never look back and never return once you have fled persecution!. Rememebr Lot's wife! Will the Swedish government next direct SWAT teams in Finland and other countries to which Swedish exiles have fled in search of educational libery? Or descend on them when they are visiting their homeland? President of the Swedish Homeschooling Association, Jonas Himmelstrand, who lives in exile with several other homeschooling families in the Ĺland Islands of Finland, is himself already feeling the iron fist of the Swedish régime in Stockholm which is demanding that he pay 100,000 Swedish Kronor (about US $15,000) in fines for refusing not send his children for Marxist indoctrination in the monopolistic state school system he fled abroad. [3] If he doesn't pay it, he could be deported to Sweden and imprisoned and his children seized. The lesson to be learned by Swedish homeschoolers: if the state has already started fining you, don't go to another EU country even if that country permits homeschooling! Go to a country where families are protected. [4] And don't seek assylum in the United States until the Romereike Case has been finally resolved and the threat of deportation to Germany, where their children will unquestionably be seized and put into foster case like so many others, has passed. And if they are deported, then every American homeschooler is under the threat of state seizure by the infamous "Child Protective Services" (CPS) whose reputation is only marginally better than the vicious Swedish Social Services (Socialtjänst).

When I first became a political activist for homeschoolers in Sweden I had no idea that there was a wider issue of state abuse of families in general. And when I moved into the whole question of state abuse of family rights in Sweden I had no idea that this was an EU-wide phenomenon. And when I moved into the whole question of EU statism and its abuse of family rights I had no idea that this was a global phenomenon. For the more closely you look at this whole business of governmental child-trafficking, the more evident it becomes that what we are dealing with is a dangerous international trend (protected by powerful and unaccoutable interest groups) and a threat to liberty everywhere. This is not just about deviant, totalitarian régimes in Germany and Sweden pretending to be defenders of liberal democracy (which they are absolutely not), it's a far, far wider global threat. We are being given a taste of what a perhaps not-so-futuristic global government is going to be like unless more people rise up to put an end to these threats to our liberties and rights.

I began this essay with a quotation from George Santayana and I am going to end with it because I believe we are about to repeat the same political mistakes of the 20th Century all over again until the majority wake up:

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" (George Santayana).

We need to retain our old libertarian family values and to ensure that any Obama-type "change", that has demonstrated over and over again is in more in line with the thinking of Karl Marx than the founding fathers of America, does not threaten them. If we don't, we can expect a new terror and a world in which there are no safe havens left anymore. I hope you will agree with me and now get into action. If you don't, be prepared to live under a world government tyranny.

Endnotes

[1] Bob Unruh, French Police Grab Four Kids on German Orders
and Michael Farris, This family was Invaded by a SWAT Team
[2] Though the father, Christer Johansson, now has overwhelming proof that the charges against him were all fabricated, the Swedish court will not reconsider the case since it removed all parental rights from the parents and handed the boy over to foster parents. All of this is, unfortunately, evidence that the Swedish government is fundamentally corrupt and is under the control of criminal elements just as Germany is ruled by an illegal government
[3] Riksföreningen för Hemundervisning i Sverige - Rohus, Homeschooling family fined 15 000 USD by the Swedish Supreme Court - also see two articles in Swedish here and here
[4] These are becoming few and far between. The most family-friendly country currently is probably Russia