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An article in the Daily Telegraph last week reported that a group of Muslim men recently swam ashore onto a nudist beach in Germany and abused the women relaxing there, calling one of them a ‘sinner’ and a ‘slut’, and going on to threaten everyone gathered in a mixture of German and Arabic. At the foot of the same article, the reporter offered a larger context for the incident, recounting a worrying list of related events in the EU’s largest nation over the last few weeks:
“(First) a 27-year-old Syrian refugee blew himself up outside a bar in Bavaria in what was described as an attempted Islamist attack which injured twelve people….On the same day, a pregnant woman was hacked to death by a Syrian man in the German town of Reutlingen… Last week, a teenage refugee from Afghanistan attacked passengers on a regional train in Bavaria with an axe, seriously injuring four of them, after pledging allegiance to the Islamic State in a video posted online….(Finally) the worst attack was carried out by a German-Iranian teenager who gunned down nine people outside a shopping centre in Munich on 22 July.”
And shortly after the article cited was published, a suitcase loaded with deodorant cans exploded outside an immigration processing centre in Zirndorf in Bavaria. It is not yet clear whether the package was designed as a makeshift bomb or whether the incident merely represents a (very bizarre) coincidence.
This is happening, lest we forget, in Germany; an economic powerhouse and one of the most important countries in the Western World. This is happening in the homeland of Kant, Nietzsche, Heine, Goethe, Planck and Beethoven. This is not happening in Iraq or Somalia. This is happening in Germany.
In response to this unprecedented chaos, Angela Merkel, the woman to whom the most blame belongs, has been stone-facedly defiant. Against all evidence and logic, the Chancellor claimed the open-door asylum policy she initiated just requires more time to work; that integration, though a slow process, will eventually bear desirable fruit; that terrorism and the beginnings of a widespread civil conflict are simply the birth pangs of a new and better order for natives and immigrants alike.
There is no way of changing the mind of someone this deluded. If she truly believes what she is saying, Chancellor Merkel has succumbed to the kind of magical thinking rarely encountered outside of psychiatric wards and millennial cults. If she truly believes that one million Syrian and Afghan single men, almost all of them fleeing nothing more than the natural consequences of their own culture – a culture to which they remain perversely wedded – will in time blend seamlessly into Northern European civilisation, then she is ill and dangerous; unfit to lead even a scout troop.
But she is not, sadly, untypical of the German political elite.
As a recent editorial noted: “For historical and understandable (reasons), German politicians are wary of acknowledging, first, that there are questions about whether all immigrants can smoothly integrate into Western societies and accept Western values and, secondly, that some voters have legitimate worries about the arrival in their country of people whose attitudes seem far removed from their own.”
It is perhaps this historical handicap that Islamists are pinning their hopes on. And it’s a tactic that may just work.
How many times have you heard in the UK or US that anti-Muslim sentiment is ‘reminiscent’ of German propaganda against the Jews in the 1920’s/30’s? How many times have you heard in the UK or US that ‘Islamophobic’ political leaders are ‘reminiscent’ of Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler? Now think how successful such slurs have been in these countries; how they have successfully made taboos out of commonsensical concepts and obvious realities.
In Germany, a country still overcast by the chimneys and moral blackness of the Holocaust, this is a hundred times more effective. Here, the Left possesses all the trump cards they require to shut down sensible debate and set the mainstream narrative all must follow to get a public hearing. They did this successfully after Cologne, and they will do it successfully after every additional outrage. The horror of Hitlerian ideology is such that anything seems preferable to agreeing with a single part of it – even if the part in question was never Hitler’s to trademark in the first place; such as patriotism and the will to national-cultural self-defence.
The backdrop against which all this is happening is worthy of noting. Just a few months ago, the toxic pseudo-memoir ‘Mein Kampf’ was republished in Germany (albeit in prohibitively bulky, heavily annotated form) for the first time since the Second World War. After less than a fortnight, the volume found itself on the national bestsellers list, and public interest in Hitler and the Nazis spiked on internet search engines.
In a loosely related development, the leadership of the main patriotic opposition party in Germany – Alternative for Germany, or AfD – has recently been dogged by accusations of anti-Semitism, a charge that is vigorously denied by party officials, but to which much press attention continues to be dedicated.
The ghost of Hitler is rising again in Germany. And whether this ghost is illusory or substantial matters little. Its effect is all that counts. The Muslims currently terrorising the country have no greater ally than this national curse. It may well prove to be the deciding factor as to whether Germany steps back from the abyss or slips irrecoverably into the darkness.
What can be done about this in the short term? Well – for one thing, the German people must make sure to remove Angela Merkel from power. Anyone else will do for now. By removing Merkel a message will be sent from the public to the political class that the policies the Chancellor has initiated are unacceptable and democratically illegimate.
As to who would make the best replacement for Merkel, my first choice would obviously be Frauke Petry, the beautiful and strong-minded leader of the AfD. With that being said, any accusations of anti-Semitism must be fully addressed by the AfD leadership if international alliances are to be protected and maintained. Given Germany’s recent history, some back-bending by its patriots is only to be expected, even if it seems on occasion like an excessive and unnecessary exercise.
It would be hyperbolic and unconvincing to call this crisis, as some are, the ‘end’ of Germany. It isn’t necessarily the end of anything. It is however a crisis with the potential to trigger the unravelling of modern Germany’s ideological consensus; the progressive and pleasant Weltanschauung, built upon rubble and regret, behind one of the longest periods of affluent stability in Germany’s short and chequered history.
D, LDN
Defend the Modern World 