The European Union chose to display this poster

A reader has alerted me to the following poster. It seems to have been produced by the European Social Forum, a movement made up of various left-wing organisations. But what's significant is that it is displayed in the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union.

Europe4ALL poster

As you can see the poster says "We can all share the same star. Europe 4 All." The star is made up of the symbols of a wide variety of religions, including Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Taoism, Shintoism and Buddhism.

There are two things I'd say about the poster. The first is that the hammer and sickle, the symbol of Marxist communism, is included amongst the religious symbols. That suggests, as many of us have long supposed, that Marxism has the role for its adherents of a secular religion. It's interesting too that the EU feels so comfortable with Marxism that it would publicly display the hammer and sickle. Marxism imposed itself by revolutionary means and ruled through the use of show trials, labour camps and secret police. Does the EU really want to associate itself with such a discredited ideology?

The second thing to note is that the poster is not just calling for tolerance amongst religions. It is announcing that Europe is "for all". With a stroke of a pen, the idea of Europe being at least primarily for Europeans and European culture has been erased.

That means that we have Africa for Africans, Asia for Asians but Europe for everybody. That doesn't exactly strike me as a balanced and fair global outcome.

If you compare the poster being displayed by the European Union to the poster currently being promoted by the African Union the difference is striking:

The Africans are calmly asserting their identity, in contrast to the Europeans whose focus is more negatively on the deconstruction of their own unique identity and tradition.