The EU does not preserve peace in Europe – instead it has brought us closer to war

George Orwell and Joseph Goebbels did not have much in common, but they both understood the essence of propaganda: if you want to tell a lie, make sure that its a big one, and if possible make it the exact opposite of the truth.

David Cameron's speech at the British Museum claiming that the EU has preserved peace in Europe, and that a British exit would make it more likely that the continent would plunge into a reprise of the two world wars, was a classic example of the Orwellian big lie.

It is, of course, Nato, not the EU, that has kept the peace since World War Two, and the EU which has already worsened – if it did not not directly cause – two armed conflicts on European soil in the former Yugoslavia and the Ukraine.

The history of EU-style multinational federations imposed by an elite from above in Europe is not a happy one. From the frayed patchworks of the Holy Roman and Hapsburg Austrian Empires, down to the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, they have invariably ended in bloody chaos, and then the peace and quiet of the graveyard.

Not for nothing did a bemused Mikhail Gorbachev – and as the man who presided over the dissolution of Russia's "evil empire" he should surely know – say that the most puzzling development in Europe over the past decade was the determination of the EU's leaders to reconstruct the Soviet Union, a failed state if there ever was one, on the soil of western Europe.

Gorbachev was speaking before the long arm of EU meddling reached as far as Ukraine, causing that vast country to split in two and threaten war with Vladimir Putin's Russia – a slow-burn crisis that may yet erupt once more into open conflict.

Back in the 1990s, the total failure of EU diplomacy helped speed former Yugoslavia into a brutal ethnic civil war. A fragile peace was finally imposed on those troubled lands not by the EU, but by Nato bombs and arm twisting backed by the Atlantic alliance's military muscle.

So the EU's record at actually keeping the peace is fairly shabby. And in fact it is not the bureaucratic and dictatorial edicts of the EU that have kept the peace in Europe, but the forces of trade, travel and globalisation. Meanwhile, it is the imposition of a top-down dictat from Brussels that is breeding resistance from an increasingly resentful European body politic.

Cameron's argument that the European Union is a force for peace and stability therefore falls at the first hurdle. But we shouldn't really be surprised by his shaky grasp of historical facts. For we are dealing, let us not forget, with a man who in 2010 committed an elementary schoolboy historical howler when he described Britain's role in 1940 as being the "junior partner" to the US in World War Two. In fact it was Britain which stood alone in that year against the totalitarian tide which had engulfed all Europe. The USA did not join in until she was attacked by Japan in December 1941 at Pearl Harbor.

Europe's totalitarian past is relevant to this debate. Of the EU's 28 member states, only three – Britain, Sweden and Ireland – have not within living memory been Communist, Nazi, Fascist or military dictatorships or occupied by the forces of such tyrannies.

The EU's founding fathers, knowing this woeful history, distrusted democracy, which they believed had brought dictators and demagogues to power, and determined that their project would create a post-democratic new order, imposed by stealth step by step on their blissfully ignorant populations.

Britain, a latecomer to the European construction, when its authoritarian foundations were already set in stone, never had a hope of influencing this profoundly undemocratic institution in the direction of our ancient Parliamentary democracy.

Now we see the results. Across Europe the vaunted European project is crumbling before our eyes. Fuelled by the mass unemployment and social dislocation caused by the disastrous Euro experiment, far from peace and order, extremist parties are on the rise across the EU from Greece to Sweden, and from France to Austria. Even in Germany, as a direct response to the tidal tsunami of migration decreed by Frau Merkel, the increasingly extreme AfD is piling on the votes.

It must be Britain's role not to plunge deeper into this morass, but to extricate ourselves as best we can from the quicksand and forge a new future in line with our past as an open and outward looking society in touch with the wide world beyond the ever shrinking European horizon.

In his speech, Cameron referred to the serried ranks of tombstones in the war cemeteries of Europe bearing silent witness to the continent's disastrous wars. I saw these cemeteries when I led the Telegraph's centenary tour of the Somme this week, and I will see more when I go to the great Franco-German killing ground of Verdun next week. The men who lie in them died for freedom – not to create a new tyranny spawning more wars.

If Britain has the guts to ignore Cameron and the Establishment elite and vote for Brexit on June 23rd, free and independent once more, we could perhaps, in the words of William Pitt the Younger, one of Cameron's great predecessors as PM who led Britain's resistance to the Napoleonic tyranny, 'Save Europe by her example'.