Angela Merkel was the true extremist of our age. History will judge hyperliberals as the vandals who dissolved our borders. By Matthew Syed in The Times.
If extremism is defined as acting out of proportion with context, history or consent, I suggest Merkel’s tenure represented the high point of postwar European extremism.
It was not just that she opened the door in 2015 to almost a million unvetted, largely male asylum seekers, but did so knowing perfectly well what the consequences would be. We know this because she alluded to many at the time of her (again, widely acclaimed) “Wir schaffen das” (“we can do this”) speech. She knew it would impose ruinous fiscal cost on the German people but she went ahead anyway, prioritising the projection of her own virtue above the interests of her voters.
The famous photos — the birth of Islamo-leftism
She knew it would add huge pressure to schools with tens of thousands of extra pupils needing German-as-second-language teaching in an already short-staffed system, not to mention adding huge tension to a tight housing market. She knew this would shaft her neighbours as migrants moved westwards, making a mockery of Schengen and adding to the drumbeat for Brexit. She must also have surely known there would be a spike in crime; rape and sexual assaults rose by 13 per cent in 2016 and asylum seekers were overrepresented sixfold in the numbers. On New Year’s Eve in 2015 more than 500 sexual offences were recorded in Cologne on a single night.
Coming up: the “rabid right”:
You’ll doubtless have noted the increasingly Orwellian terminology applied to parties such as the AfD, Reform and the like. It started with “far” right, then moved to “hard” right, then “radical” right. Soon they will be labelled the “rabid right” …
Who are the extremists here?
Who are the extremists here? Is it the people who want to rip up a chronically out of date legal framework or “moderates” who follow in the footsteps of Mutti by waving them in?
My sense is that the leaders of the various uniparties believed their legacies would be defined by the tenets of wokeism, seeing this ideology not as a passing cultural spasm but a new moral paradigm. This is why we got trans ideology (was this not extremist?), net zero zealotry (was this not extremist, at least in its implementation?) and more.
It is also why I believe history will judge the likes of Cameron, Johnson, Trudeau, Hollande, Macron and von der Leyen as the most disastrous in postwar history since they undermined both the concept of the nation state and the alliance that defends our version of it.
Henrik Dahl points out the consequences of a lying media that omits anything that does not support a leftist point of view:
In Merkel’s own country, Germany, the political centre is collapsing. Nationwide opinion polls suggest that the three establishment parties that rebuilt Germany after the Second World War now command the support of only around a third of the electorate between them.
Nor is Germany the only country where the political centre is collapsing. The same is happening in France [and all western countries]…
The extraordinary denial of reality that, in my assessment, Merkel allowed to take hold when it came to immigrants’ responsibility for antisemitism, violence against women, terrorism and gang crime.
Coming from Denmark, where we have reliable statistics on all these matters, I find it frankly shocking to listen to the nonsense coming from Germany’s political elite.
But I would also trace back to Merkel the rise of what is often called “Islamo-leftism” — a tendency that has recently gained ground in Sweden and is also growing in Germany. In Sweden, polls have indicated that 85 per cent of Muslim voters support parties to the left of centre, with almost one in five supporting the Left Party, Vänsterpartiet — a party tainted by antisemitism and the glorification of terrorism. I see no compelling reason to assume that the pattern in Germany is fundamentally different.
My argument, then, is that it is not only the rise in support for the AfD that can be traced back to Merkel. The same applies to the growing support for parties on the German left that promote the political and religious views of a significant proportion of the people, Merkel invited to Germany. Not least on the Gaza question.
Pigs fly:
We need to discuss this openly and honestly. Otherwise, we cannot understand why the political centre is collapsing in so many countries today.
Commenters:
Ronald Regan said 40 years ago something along the line of “when fascism return to the west it will be in the form of hyperliberalism”.