Listen to Vladimir Bukovsky.(THE LAST WORD)

After enduring 12 years in the prisons, labor camps, and psychiatric institutions of the former Soviet Union, Vladimir Bukovsky was expelled to the West in 1976. Settling in England, he launched his decades-long criticism of Soviet rule. More recently, he has also become an outspoken opponent of the European Union. Likening the developing European Union to the Soviet Union, he urges abolishing the EU before its mask comes off and the world finds out that the so-called trade arrangement will be similar in every way to the monstrous tyranny he experienced in his former homeland.

In a recent speech delivered in Brussels on the doorstep of EU headquarters, Bukovsky told of his good fortune in being allowed to return to Russia in 1992 where he read confidential documents from once-secret Soviet files. What he found confirmed to him the existence of a "conspiracy" (the word is his) to develop the European Union into a totalitarian socialist superstate.

The outspoken Soviet dissident pointed specifically to the January 1989 visit paid to Mikhail Gorbachev by a top-level delegation of the Trilateral Commission. The group included Japan's Yasuhiro Nakasone, France's Valery Giscard d'Estaing, and David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger from the United States. These well-known power brokers, according to Bukovsky's account, told Gorbachev that he must take his country "into the financial institutions of the world, such as GATT, the IMF and the World Bank." The dutiful Gorbachev complied by taking a step back from overt Soviet tyranny, paving the way for the old Soviet bloc to be accepted into the world community and to receive the Western aid that followed.

Even more, according to Bukovsky's gleaning of the proceedings of this extraordinary meeting, Giscard d'Estaing bluntly told Gorbachev that Europe would soon become a single "federal state" and that he must allow "the other Eastern European countries to interact with it." At that moment in history, these countries were still part of the far-flung Soviet empire, and the EU, still not formally entangling its member nations as later occurred with the 1992 Maastricht treaty, continued its masquerade as a mere trade agreement.

But Gorbachev knew which way the world was being steered by the powerful personages who visited him and their fellow architects for world order. He had already written his 1987 book Perestroika in which he envisioned a "common European home ... from the Atlantic to the Urals." He knew the ...