In 2015 history repeated itself: Germany once again plunged the continent into misfortune. Merkel’s now legendary order not to reject refugees at the border has triggered a chain reaction that has cost thousands of lives and jeopardized the whole idea of a united Europe. Her reaction to criticism from her own country? The by-now immortalized sentence: ‘We can do it!’ Critics from Europe have been accused of standing on the ‘wrong side of history’. Phrases like ‘humanity’, ‘immigration society’ or ‘colourful society’ were fired as unrestrainedly as accusations of Nazism against every critic, until these words had lost all meaning.
Now, just under four years later, this regime faces the collapse of its politics. Merkel already had to resign her role as party leader, the chancellorship is next. In some areas, especially in the successor states of the former German Democratic Republic, the right-wing conservative AfD, Alternative für Deutschland, has become one of the strongest parties.1 One would think that the winds were turning and that the people no longer wanted to support their leadership’s policies. But is this really the truth?
Not at all. The real party of the hour are the Greens. The party that makes no bones about always emphasizing how they not only reject the culture of their homeland, but hate it, who can not get enough of the population exchange with migrants from the Middle East and Africa, and who, despite embracing a trailblazing feminism, are full of praise for Islam.2 The Christian Democratic Union has recognized this trend and is already setting the course to replace the bottomless Social Democratic Party by the former eco-party. For anyone who wants to find out about this latter’s illusory ideas for the future of the world, a look at the media landscape is recommended: slogans to promote the change towards renewable energy, threat-mongering on climate apocalypse and marauding Nazi hordes – this party is no longer about long-term, solution-oriented policies for the benefit of People, but seeks rather a return to the eternal, middle-class students revolution of 1968.
Apropos of the media: If you think that the German media take a critical stance to all of this, you’re wrong. All of the public-service broadcasters publicly funded by compulsory payments walk the government’s line. It is not enough that Chancellor Merkel and the Green Party darlings of the bourgeois boulevard, a.k.a. Feuilleton, are lifted onto a pedestal by the press, in a way that no one has seen since the attitude of the Völkischer Beobachter; no, but critical voices are actively denounced, and real campaigns are brought against newspapers and magazines, contrary to their right to their own opinions, to make them disappear from the newsagents. For the journalist jailed in Venezuela, Billy Six of the conservative weekly newspaper Junge Freiheit, not one of his mainstream colleagues has lifted a single finger,3 while Denis Yüzel, hired by the liberal newspaper Die Welt, after being released from Turkish custody, was afforded a flight home in a government aircraft under the eyes of the nationwide press.4 These pro-government journalists make no secret of their affiliation with the radical leftist Antifa, but even promote the actions of the latter and court associated groups on the screen as well as in print. The dangerous part is that they have completely mastered the public mainstream narrative. This goes so far that after the murder of a German family-man in Chemnitz by migrants, after an unprecedented media campaign, a ‘concert against right-wing extremism’ was organized under the motto ‘Wir sind mehr’,5 and migrants were given free rides to the concert from all over the country. And if all that was not enough, this concert, which was advertised on Facebook by the German Federal President, was aptly held in front of the Karl Marx Monument. The trigger for all of this was a second-long video in which a German scared off a migrant in the same city in the context of a demonstration;6 the video was shared by a social media activist known by the nom de guerre ‘Antifa Zeckenbiss’, who is now considered a credible news source by the German media.
Many, if not most, European countries have already turned their backs on Merkel’s politics and have taken some very different courses. Countries like Austria, Italy, the Visegrad states and Denmark are working hard to limit or undo the damage caused by Germany’s ‘Welcome Policy’. Austria and Italy in particular had until recently governments faithful to the German government, and probably made the sharpest change of course towards a zero-tolerance policy. Other states stand at least an arm’s distance from Germany, with the exception of France, without which Merkel would probably already be largely isolated on European soil. Merkel should not be so happy about this relationship since Macron is under heavy fire by the Yellow Vests movement.
If we go back a little more than a hundred years, it is clear that Germany has been the linchpin of the pan-European misfortune for at least that period of time. For example, the First World War did not have to happen. The Austro-Hungarian heir apparent was assassinated in Sarajevo and the k.u.k. army was mobilized to take punitive action. The Danube monarchy asked its allies, the German Reich, to watch its back in case of Russian interference. What did Germany do? They reactivated a nineteenth-century tactical plan, the Schlieffen Plan, for fear of possible French intervention, and marched over Belgium and into France to stop the French from attacking; realizing halfway through the maneuver that they could not take Paris, the German lines being too thin to surround the city, they marched past it and buried themselves in the mud for the next four years. As if that were not enough, they put Lenin, who had been exiled from Austria-Hungary to Switzerland (he stayed in Gallicia when the war started, Austrian authorities detained him and exiled him to Switzerland a few weeks later), in an armored train and so that he could destabilize their war enemy, Russia (which even worked), thus creating the Soviet Union and laying the foundation for further communist revolutions. What happened in the following decades can be taken from the history books: expropriations, massacres, the Holodomor, forced collectivization, Stalinist paranoia – and all of this without so much as considering the horrors perpetrated by their comrades from China, North Korea or Latin America, and later the German Democratic Republic and the other satellite states. One can confidently say that the battle for a few hundred square kilometers in East Germany has meant the death of some 100 million people. The fact that communist ideology relies on the works of the German journalist and philosopher Karl Marx fits into this picture in an idyllic way.
Not twenty years later, the NSDAP came to power and declared war on half of the world until its 1945 capitulation. People in Germany today like to protest, ‘But Hitler was Austrian!’ which is true in principle; but it can be seen from his memoirs that he always felt German and that he never got past his period as a homeless postcard painter there in Austria. Millions of dead, a Europe irrelevant to the world, a Cold War between the states of NATO and the Warsaw Pact were the result – all this before the millennium came to an end. Ironically, the Soviet Union, made possible by German intervention in 1917, was the main ideological and military enemy. Germany had to learn the hard way in these years that you cannot turn back the wheel of history, for in attempting to do so, you damned yourself to repeat it.
And today? Germany is once again trying to rebuild the world out of self-interest. While the Germans are not actively seeking today for ‘Lebensraum in the East’ for German settlers, it is now the same within the German borders for migrants from all over the world. By trying to eradicate their sins in the twentieth century, by trying to declare paradise on Earth, Germany will bring against every critic, be he domestic or foreign, a blanket denunciation of being what the Germans no longer want to be: ‘Nazis’. One would think that this knee-jerk reproach is projection of the first order. On the one hand, Germany celebrates the Mea Culpa of the Holocaust on a spiritual level; on the other hand, they make it especially difficult for their Jewish minority by importing anti-Semitism from the Arab world. The representatives of the system parties are almost stupid enough to denounce Jews who support parties like the AfD as ‘quota Jews’, which is not far away from denying them the right to call themselves Jews in the first place.7
In light of these events, Europe must begin to think about how to deal with Germany in the future. In addition to the above-mentioned practices, Germany also focuses disproportionately on Russia; Apparently, alongside with the Democratic Party of the USA and other old acquaintances from the ‘coalition of the willing’ from the G.W. Bush era, Germany feels that the old image of the Russian enemy should be reactivated. This is also practical: one no longer always has to say ‘Nazi’, since ‘Ivan’ is also back in fashion. Just as some people do not tire of claiming that Trump became president through the intervention of Russian hackers, so in Germany social media discourses are evidently constantly threatened by ‘Russian bots’ – which allegations are of course never substantiated empirically.8 Meanwhile users of the network known as ‘Sifftwitter’, a loose community affiliated to the 4chan subculture, were recently presented as Russian agents – bringing amused laughter to insiders.
A first good step would be a dissolution of the European Union as we know it today. The UK is already moving in this direction, but it is spared the necessity of taking one massive hurdle: overcoming the euro. While a withdrawal from the EU is decidedly possible (even if the EU can make things as difficult as possible for dropouts, the whole process being a bit like a dirty divorce proceeding), no nation has expressed any intention to leave the euro.9 As a result, if the German nation does not come to its senses again, it would be necessary to isolate them internationally to avert further damage. It may sound very harsh, but Germany is back on its trip, believing that they can impose their will on the rest of Europe. Merkel openly demands that the refugees she invited into Germany (who in fact are in the majority of cases actually regular migrants trying to get into European social systems on easy street, by posturing as economic migrants, who who have no intention of integrating into the European society at all) be shared within the EU (‘Everyone has to do their part’) and also contemplates aloud the possibility of sanctions against those states that want to deny her – especially the V4 countries, which are more or less represented by the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán.10 There is not a week goes by without news of German women being raped and murdered by migrants (discussing such things on social media can even get you some jail time), and it seems that Germany thinks the whole of Europe should enjoy this special kind of enrichment. The German President Steinmeier has, after all, extended his compliments to Tehran,11 and since Islam is just the new religion in fashion in Germany, the country may as well immediately take Iran as a role model on how to deal with political and economic sanctions.
The idea of isolating Germany should also be considered in light of the special relationship between the Germany government and Islam. Germany has virtually no fear of contact with the more radical varieties of Islam. Statesmen such as Erdoğan are courted, and Steinmeier congratulated Iran on behalf of the Federal Republic for forty years of Islamic revolution, driving a tolerant course towards Islamist mosque associations and returnees from the failed ‘Islamic State’. Where German politicians from traditionally atheistic parties demand total equality between men and women on one day, officially introducing the ‘third gender’ into the census and speculating aloud about the possibility of a 50% female quota in politics (which constitutionally would actually be forbidden), they pose the next day wearing a headscarf at the local mosque opening, praising Islam as a ‘religion of peace’ as if it were the spiritual incarnation of a rainbow society. Then perhaps Germany should be divided from the rest of Europe, to make these experiments on its own.
The rest of Europe may then finally flourish again and the nations would be able to pursue their own destinies in peace. The Greeks would be particularly happy.
References
1‘Kommt der AfD-Durchmarsch im Osten?’, Sächsische, 28 December 2018. Cf. ‘Mehr Flüchtlinge nach Ostdeutschland? Was dafür spricht – und was dagegen’, Spiegel, 20 July, 2015.
2‘Die Grünen wollen den Islam einbürgern’, Welt, 5 July 2012.
3‘Dunkle Einzelzelle in Caracas’, Frankfurter Allgemeine, 8 March, 2019.
4‘Freiheit für Deniz Yücel’, Tagesschau, 16 February 2018.
5Literally, ‘We are more’, meaning there are more protesters than there are ‘right-wing extremists’.
6‘Streit über „Hetzjagden“’, Nordwest Zeitung, 10 September, 2018.
7‘Rechts, deutsch, jüdisch’, Spiegel, 6 October 2018.
8‘Wie russische Bots fast unbemerkt im deutschen Wahlkampf mitmischten’, Über Medien, 15 September 2017.
9 See for instance ‘Leaving the Euro Would Be Devilishly Difficult’, The Economist, March 25, 2017.
10‘Visegrad-Länder boykottieren Merkels Asyl-Gipfel’, Tages Anzeiger, 21 June 2018.
11 ‘Steinmeier Congratulates the Mullah Regime’, Bild, 21 February 2019.
Intriguing! A bit harsh on Germany, though. Germany is the “Central Power” of the Continent. Its domestic politics influence its foreign policy in the same way that the French Revolution influenced Napoleon. Today, the “guilt trip” is all of it. It’s Sad! But, as Nietzsche put it, “take pride in your enemy. Then, all he has is yours.” Germany had a lot, but we in the West feel the loss, that the victors of 1945 inflicted upon all of us. What goes around, comes round. Karma! WW2! A Pyric Victory is there ever was one.
This article is awful. It tries to pin Germans as the enemy of Europe, when it’s clear Germany has been hijacked by another group. Yes Modern Germany is in a bad place but it is no fault of the Germans, and all the fault of the money powers. You are spreading the same lie that is damaging Europe only with a right wing take on it.
I agree. Whatever can the editors be thinking?
The editors work from the axiom that if we publish only what we agree with, it will hardly render our Journal more interesting or vital.
That is, of course, not a fully adequate response, since we do not indiscriminately accept everything that is submitted. I will note then that Mr. Pryde is working from a long-standing German tradition of scepticism with regard to overweening German political influence, which can be traced back to no lesser figures than Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, Richard Strauss and Hermann Hesse. This tradition may be misguided or wrong-headed, but it cannot be disregarded simply because it happens to correlate with the shameful shame-mongering of our contemporary historiography.
I would add that there is much in Mr. Pryde’s writing which is clearly rhetorical. Thus Mr. Pryde might well overstate his case; all the more reason then to articulate, either in comments or in a corresponding essay, precisely where and how he has failed to do justice to the historical situation of the past hundred years.
I can guarantee you that, whichever form they take, such ideas would be most welcome here.
the main reason i wrote this article was to spark a long overdue debate about germanys role in contemporary european politics and put it in a historical context (and i don’t even got into germanys role during the economic crisis from 2008 upwards, if you ignore the last sentence of the article). you say “(…) Modern Germany is in a bad place but it is no fault of the Germans (…)” and i’m going to ask: isn’t germany a democracy? since yes, why are the german people still voting the status quo? the last bundestagswahl was held in 2017, two years into merkels unleashed multicultural open border politics with all it’s consequences. she and her party still made almost 33%, while most other european countries with similar policys than hers had very different exit polls around this time (see: austria, italy). a look at more current trends shows, that the CDU is already losing ground (29%) but would still win the next election and then it will probably get into a coalition with the green party (it seems the losing vote go to this party and to the AfD), wich would make the situation even worse. this is already in the talks (see: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/annegret-kramp-karrenbauer-und-katrin-goering-eckardt-offen-fuer-schwarz-gruen-a-1254850.html )
i’m fully aware that many conservative and right wing germans will still disagree, but try to look at the situation from another point of view. in every historic example i’ve listed, germany had a vital part in the escalation of the situation (and yes, i’m refusing to go into conspiracy theories surrounding the start of ww2). nazi germany tried to undo the “shameful outcome” of ww1 with ww2 and now germany is trying to undo the “barbaric outcome” of ww2 with it’s turboliberal one-world-policy – and enforce it on the rest of the continent on the long run. sounds familiar?
it’s still time to undo this and to choose another path and i’m the last one who want’s to see germany – and as a result, europe – to plunge into a violent confilct. julian langness wrote in lenght about such a scenario in “The Coming War In Europe: Essays On Europe’s Impending Destabilization And Internal Confrontation With Islam” and took sweden as an example. while this is still very valid, germany could suffer a very similar destiny. many european countries are at best 10 years away to think about a solution to not become a victim of this fallout (yes, i’m that pessimistic).
it’s still time, but patience is running out eventually.
Your view, then, is of Germany, the Central Power, which determined the Continent?
I think that way.
So did Joseph Stalin, between the world wars.
von Bismarck, too, as well as Mark Twain.
So did the Napoleons, both of them, when France was the Continental Hegemon, just a little south of Germany.
But Metternich passed the torch to Germany, if Bonaparte hadn’t’ already, while the Adams stood aloof from things he did not understand.
That was a much better world!
Having lived in Germany, I think this article is bang on. It isn’t the Germanic ethos that is being blamed here, but the corrupted and modern facsimile we find today. The Germans are an incredibly determined and productive people. When dedicated to traditional values, they build great societies. However, when dedicated to multicultural egalitarianism, as are most societies today, they tend to excel in that direction too. The German industriousness has made them a prominent actor on the world stage. Unfortunately of late, it has been possessed by a self-loathing cultural Marxism.
Agree!
I lived in Germany for 3 years.
What Germans say, they will do.
I am an American and I found that German will refreshing! Scary, sometimes, but fear is no longer an option. Our American, insular, geopolitical space breeds complacency which is no longer an option in an ever smaller world.
Wars are inflection points in history, but never the axis of the graph.
The Western World has along way to go, whatever our degenerate elements have to say about it.