(*This opinion / analytical article was written by Ivan Dikov for The European Views website.)

Brexit is Britain’s biggest European opt-out – the opt-out from responsibility. Nothing more, nothing less.

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It’s not just Brexit Day but also Brexit hour – midnight on January 31, 2020, Brussels time (CET), 11 pm GMT, and 1 am on February 1, 2020, EET – that this article is getting published.

With stuff that are as historic as Brexit, one can afford some minor technical notes.

So it’s finally happening this Brexit. This Brexit thing is here to stay. Or, maybe, better yet, it’s finally going down (puns either intended, or unintended).

Feels at least a little bit surreal, at least for those Europeans out there, on both sides of the English Channel, who care about Europe, climate change, Western Civilization, and other important stuff.

Brexit is one of those things that pop up out of nowhere (or out of a basket of misguided grievances and past imperial mirages, skillfully garnished by false prophets with plentiful “fake news”, which is really a misfortunate euphemism for “lies”) – but when they do pop up, you don’t exactly remember what it was like before they did. It is a

“What did we use to talk about?”

-type situation (which is a very ingenious quote from “Friends”, by the way).

I myself have done my fair share of commenting on Brexit – both years before it became a thing, and in the past couple of years when the possibility of it actually happening felt not just surreal but semi-real, or even unreal.

Now, I don’t want to claim that I predicted Brexit – but I actually have articles on the Brexit matter as early 2011 (in my article entitled “Let the Brits Go!”) and 2013 (in my article entitled “Give the Brits Tea and Sympathy!”).

My rationale at the time was simple, and it was based on the constant whining and ranting of the entire British press, and not just the infamous tabloids, about how evil the EU is, not to mention the Brits’ unwanted intra-EU compatriots from the eastern (post-communist) part of the Union.

It wasn’t that I predicted Brexit – I just thought it should happen, that the UK should leave the EU if it is that disgruntled with it all time. It just didn’t seem to make sense for the Brits to stay in the Union.

And that was my line of thought back in 2011 – 2013, way before the once self-conceited David Cameron took his ill-advised Brexit referendum gamble.

Poor David had remained oblivious to the vile “Zuckerberg Effect”, namely, the rise and omnipotence of the Anti-Social Media (erroneously, paradoxically, and ridiculous known as “social media”), whose double practical consequence has been to enable the forces of global evil through trolls, bots, “fake news” (LIES), superficiality, and ignorance.

And even back in 2011, I was curious to see what new scapegoat the British press would find to blame for all of Britain’s problems once the UK actually leaves the European Union…

Read the rest of this article on The European Views website here

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