Regular readers may remember that I’ve been dabbling with learning German for the last several years. My mom’s people came over to the States in the 1880s from Germany, and at some point we’re going to visit there to follow some of mom’s genealogy. Also, since I have Alzheimer’s in my family, I’ve been doing everything I can to keep myself in decent shape, eat right, and exercise my mind in ways known to help slow the advance of that particular affliction. And one such mental activity is learning another language.
Hence, German.
So I’ve been noticing stories about Germany more lately, and three particular ones caught my interest, all of which contain very timely lessons for us. First, the story of the AFD electoral victory in the region of Saxony-Anhalt; second, how unhappy that electoral victory has made former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and third, the fact that there has been a brain drain of people leaving Germany.
While I don’t follow German politics very much at all, I do know that the AFD (Alternative for Germany) party is constantly derided as far-right, with dark mutterings about Nazi affiliations. The first time I saw the “far-right” label, I guessed that the party is actually center right. Because the dominant MSM throughout Europe seems to be similar to our MSM: the noun “right” must always be accompanied by one of a short list of adjectives (“far,” “hard” or “extreme”).
And the “Nazi” label is familiar to anybody who has paid attention to American politics, where every right-winger is assumed to be a Nazi until proven innocent. And spoiler alert: they can never be proven innocent. (Meanwhile Gropey McSturmfuhrer Platner, with an actual SS Totenkopf tattoo, is just a snuggly, blue-collar oyster farmer.) The big difference in Germany is that with their 20th century history, nearly every party has a Kevin Bacon-esque connection to either national socialists, or to international socialists (i.e. everyone who lived under Soviet and Stasi control in East Germany until the USSR fell).
So I did 38-seconds’ worth of a search, and found that the AFD’s co-leaders are Alice Weidel – a lesbian married to a woman – and Tino Chrupalla – whose name suggests Polish ancestry. (Because Nazis were well known for their warm feelings toward lesbians and Poles.) The AFD seems way too comfortable with the KGB thug currently running Russia (again, a strange position for a Nazi group to take), but the single issue that has driven their rise and success in recent cycles is a promise to close their borders and deport the millions of immigrants from Islamic and other Third World countries whom Angela Merkel’s government allowed in.
Recent polls consistently showed that the German people have not been pleased with the rising crime, welfare burdens and terrorist attacks on various Christmas markets that have come along with the influx of thinly vetted migrants. But the “respectable” German political parties (i.e. the leftist ones) have told their citizens whatever is German for “go F[riend] yourself.” (Ooh, trigger warning for you German speakers, because I just looked it up: “Fick dich.”)
So a week ago, the AFD won 51% of the vote on election day, clearly a result of the citizenry saying, “Nein, DU fick dich, comrade!”
But a funny thing happened after the polls closed. German elites had often spoken of an anti-AFD “firewall” that was intended to ensure that those evil Nazi lesbians never be allowed to win elections, and what do you know? A surge of late mail-in ballots came in, and those ballots had results wildly different than all the in-person votes. When the dust (and the bull scheisse) had cleared, the AFD had only 43.8% of the vote. That makes them the largest party, but just three seats short of the absolute majority that would have allowed them to honor the democratically expressed intentions of German citizens.
Gee, it’s almost like widespread mail-in voting is way more susceptible to cheating, whether in California, Illinois, New York or Deutschland. (Remember when Obama made that same point? I mean, before he flip-flopped, and started touting how great loosely regulated mail-in voting was?)
Anyway, the AFD’s strong showing disturbed Angela Merkel, Germany’s Chancellor from 2005 – 2018. While Merkel led a party that was nominally center-right, she turned out to be a Germanic Abigail Spanberger – pretending to be a moderate but governing hard left.
National Review summed up her tenure as having “transformed a high-social-trust society with an economy the envy of Europe into a declining economic and social power riven by crime, social unrest, and seemingly irreversible economic decline.” She also veered to the left by avoiding fiscal sanity, specifically by undermining Germany’s energy security and stability “by shutting down nuclear power plants, committing to green energy, and adopting a policy of relying on Russian gas.”
Then, in 2015, she opened the borders to a flood of immigrants from Syria and other Third World countries. And when Germans wanted to speak freely about what a cluster-schtup that was turning into, she pushed through a new censorship law to muzzle popular dissent.
Sounds about right. And it explains how the AFD — originally known as the “professors’ party” founded by to free-market economists in 2013, and a tiny, fringe group at first – became the powerhouse that won big last week.
The third story is a column written by German professor Rainer Zitelmann entitled, “More and More Germans Are Leaving Their Country, Unexpectedly!” (Okay, that “unexpectedly” was mine. But Rainer knows his scheisse.)
Zitelmann documents the trend of talented and ambitious Germans leaving their country, to the tune of around a quarter-million per year for more than a decade. (The net loss is a little less than 100,000 per year, since some people have also been moving in.) Zitelmann points to recent studies finding that around 1 in 5 Germans say they are considering emigrating, and among those under 29, 21% “are making concrete plans” to do so.
Zitelmann also references a recently published book by Alexander Steffen called “Goodbye Deutschland,” in which he reveals that those leaving are predominantly highly skilled (75% have college degrees, and on the whole they are ambitious and entrepreneurial), while those moving in tend to be low-skilled. While Steffen supports “qualified immigration,” he warns of a trend we’d be wise to beware of: “Too often, [Germany] keeps and financially supports people who burden its system, while losing or driving away people who would make the country stronger.”
Zitelmann mentions that many of those fleeing Germany complain about high tax rates and punitive levels of micro-managing government regulations, but he also points out that many of those he interviews find greater fault with the same trend that has shown up in a Ipsos-MORI survey of 13 nations: Germany is second only to France in the amount of social envy directed at the rich.
The successful emigres don’t like the high taxes, but they leave primarily because of the social stigma directed at them for succeeding. “Elsewhere, success is an invitation; here, it is grounds for suspicion.” Self-employed and small business owners didn’t like the endless forms and punitive regulations, but they moved away “because they felt that the state treated them as adversaries rather than as the people who pay for the whole system.”
The motivations of those who left to start businesses or invest elsewhere can be summed up by one man who said, “I didn’t leave because of the taxes. I left because of the envy.”
I don’t think it takes a genius to see the connections among these three stories, nor to recognize their relevance for our country. Mass immigration – especially when many of the immigrants want to bring their own cultures with them rather than assimilate – is disastrous. And Uncle God might just have known what He was doing when He sent Moses down the mountain with 10 rules, one of which said, “Don’t covet.” (That’s Old Testament for “envy.”)
Also, we should heed the 20th century’s main lesson: don’t elect communists. (That’s Old School for “socialists.”)
NR was unusually pointed – but not wrong – when it described Angela Merkel as “Germany’s second-most-regrettable chancellor.” (That’s gotta sting!)
And David Strom summed up her philosophy – and that of the socialists writ large – perfectly, arguing that when she was being raised in East Germany, Merkel imbibed the leftist world view: “A firm belief that reality has no sway over the course of history … a misplaced sense that social justice and social good can come from ignoring basic facts…and that reality has a power all its own, and the battle to overcome it leads only to decline and tyranny.”
Unfortunately for Germany, she did not learn that.
Because as Strom notes, “Her impulse was to replicate East German policies in the West. You can take the girl out of East Germany, but apparently you can’t take East Germany out of the girl.”
Can we please not repeat Germany’s mistakes here?
Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!
0-0-0
If you enjoyed this column, please share it, and click Subscribe (on the bottom of your phone screen, or the right side of your computer screen) to receive a notice when new columns post.
Martin Simpson 