In Brexit Debate, David Cameron Recites European History, BoJo Sings in German

On June 23, as Brits go to the polls for the “Brexit” referendum, much more than just the country’s European Union membership will hang in the balance. According to the lead campaigners on either side, Brits will also decide Europe’s future as a space for peace and liberal democracy.

In two gloriously pedantic speeches on Monday, Prime Minister David Cameron and London’s former mayor, Boris Johnson, injected European history, enlightenment philosophy, and German poetry into the Brexit debate.

Cameron, who earned a degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics at Oxford University — where he also allegedly slipped a “private part of his anatomy” into a dead pig’s mouth — waxed grandiose about the broad sweep of European history.

“Either we influence Europe, or it influences us,” Cameron said, “from Caesar’s legions to the wars of the Spanish Succession, from the Napoleonic Wars to the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

The overarching point of the E.U., Cameron reminded his audience, is to stop Europe from self-destructing in another world war, something that it has in fact successfully managed to do for decades.

“Can we be so sure that peace and stability on our continent are assured beyond any shadow of doubt? Is that a risk worth taking? I would never be so rash as to make that assumption.”

On a more nationalistic note, he invoked Britain’s greatest wartime leader, Winston Churchill, as a supporter of institutionalized European unity.

Churchill “argued passionately for Western Europe to come together, to promote free trade, and to build institutions which would endure so that our continent would never again see such bloodshed.”

Elsewhere in London, the city’s philandering, buffoonish former mayor, Boris Johnson, touched on classical Greek history, behavioral therapy, and his personal biography to explain why Brits should leave the EU.

“I am a child of Europe. I am, as I say, a liberal cosmopolitan and my family is a genetic U.N. peacekeeping force,” Johnson said.

“I can read novels in French. I think I have read a novel in Spanish. I can sing the ode to joy in German… if you keep accusing me of being a little ignorant I will!”

“I find it offensive, insulting, irrelevant, and positively cretinous to be told — sometimes by people who can barely speak a foreign language — that I belong to a group of small-minded xenophobes; because the truth is, it is Brexit that is now the great project of European liberalism,” explained Johnson, who studied classics on a scholarship to Oxford.

In his peroration, Johnson aligned the “leave camp” with the “tradition of the liberal cosmopolitan European enlightenment – not just of Locke and Wilkes, but of Rousseau and Voltaire…it is we few, we happy few who have the inestimable advantage of believing strongly in our cause.”

But the chain between his campaign and moral philosophy reaches far past the enlightenment thinkers and a passing nod at Shakespeare’s “band of brothers”– all the way to the bedrock of democracy. The ever-erudite Johnson likened his struggle against the E.U. to the battle of Marathon between the ancient Greeks and the Persians, an epic fight for freedom versus an “outdated absolutist ideology.”

“That is the choice on June 23,” he added.

What Johnson didn’t recall is that Marathon didn’t secure Greek freedom against Persian tyranny. That took another epic battle at Salamis, ten years later.

In other words, Brexiters — buckle up.

Photo credit: WILL OLIVER/AFP/GettyImages