Stepping Over the Past

Germany has been in the headlines lately, not least because of J.D. Vance’s recent visit. He told the Germans, with the same American brashness served up in the 1940s, what he thought of them. I was reminded of Denethor in Lord of the Rings – the elder steward of Gondor who looked too long at Sauron, could not do what was required, and incinerated himself instead. This is the feeling twenty-first century Europe conjures, though there are hopeful signs amidst the Spenglerian sense of decline.

A savvy post on X recently circulated, captioning the photo taken last year of a German police officer being stabbed in the neck by a terrorist whilst tackling the wrong person. ‘This is Europe in a nutshell,’ it read. The police officer died, the Jihadist was shot, and a total of seven people were wounded. The image of the police officer holding down an ethnic German, whilst the foreign madman continued unabated, had unintentional deep symbolism, even if itself an imperfect reading of the event. It is through symbols that people communicate the ideas no essay can manage.

Such symbols bode poorly for today’s Europe. Rightly might many wonder what their governments are about. In the old days, those that helped foreigners and harmed citizens were considered traitors. Not always without controversy, mind, but this was the reason Cicero had Catiline’s followers strangled without trial; why King Charles I went to the block; why Ezra Pound spent over a decade in a psychiatric hospital.

In times of peace it is difficult to make good arguments in support of a foreign power; in times of war, impossible. But foreign people are a different story. In our age of porous borders, mass migration and Universal Man, the elevation of foreign people is considered the height of moral rectitude. On this subject three great factions, ordinarily opposed, march in lockstep. The first is the world of multinational business, who prioritise shareholder value over labour conditions, and are aboard this journey for cynical reasons. The second is our postmodern priesthood – the intelligentsia, the press, the entertainment industrial complex and the universities – who harbour deluded messianic visions of secular paradise. The third is an internationalist managerial class, composed of politicians, career bureaucrats, and many millions of functionaries who grind the gears of state. The predicament of today’s West rests on moral pillars composed of economic utility, ethical certainty, and the unrestrained growth of intrusive government.

All three are hostile to the notion of historically-defined nations for a medley of reasons. They harm profits; they negate the fever-dream of a deracinated and divested world; they require less government largesse. Foreigners imported en-masse are able to fill the needs of all these factions at once. Many factioneers seem driven by a pathological hatred of historic Europeans, or so their actions suggest. As the old saying has it, ‘those who the gods would destroy they first make mad.’ Perhaps there is method to the madness; perhaps it is only madness. That will be a question for historians.

When people decry that German authorities hold a double standard – charging a German man for calling a politician fat, for example, while imported criminality grows around them – they are assuming good faith on the part of their rulers. It is an error to mistake stupidity for calculated malice, what Sam Francis termed anarcho-tyranny. Petty criminals are not a threat to the status quo, but a mobilised public, growing tired of the direction things are heading, is. When you can no longer convince and cajole through the various means available – education and entertainment being the most ubiquitous – then the gloves come off.

It is a case of the people letting the elites down. This has happened before; last time, in the Communist world, they were starved and brutalised for the same sin. This time a new body politic is being imported instead. This is why Keir Starmer put grandparents in prison for Facebook boomer-posting, and why agents of the German security services think it’s funny to lock people up for their opinions. If you think our own recently-strengthened hate speech laws won’t go the same way, I’ve a lemon to sell you.

All Europeans, and the Anglosphere by extension, are haunted by the ghost of Adolf Hitler, even if our grandparents dropped bombs on Hamburg or defended Tobruk. We are told there are two options available to us: the sclerotic, suicidal zeitgeist of the present set, or Auschwitz. Every vote for AfD, or the local equivalent, is a vote for cattle trains rattling east. But there is a third option; in German, vergangenheitsbewältigung – stepping over the past.

The younger generation, whose formative years were unlike their forbears, are looking to step over the past. Votes are still being counted in Germany, but it looks like a fifth of the population aren’t spooked by Hitler’s ghost. Something profound is happening there, particularly in the east, but this will not be reflected in the government formed.

AfD will not be invited into a coalition with the CDU/CSU, who at this stage have 28% of the vote. Instead, CDU/CSU will join with their erstwhile rivals, the SPD, who sit at a mere 16%, in order to keep the ‘firewall’ excluding the AfD from power. The shambolic zeitgeist will continue in Germany, and by extension, much of Western Europe. The CDU/CSU, an eternal shapeshifter, turned to the right in recent years to court populist concerns and siphon energy from the AfD; but this is the party that produced Angela Merkel and presided for most of the 2010s. These are hardly the markers of staunch conservatism. But conservatism today rarely seems staunch, in character more like a latter-day Von Papen: ready to capitulate or compromise at any moment, only this time afraid Adolf Hitler might be under the bed.

Western governments in the 1990s and 2000s took a calculated risk when they dipped their toe into mass migration, hoping for a painless shortcut to economic growth. The situation is difficult now, but will become dangerous in the future. The utopian dream has failed and soon Europe will have to decide between suicide or survival. Their demographic transformation is akin to the Moors taking Spain in the eighth century. Many are waiting for El Cid, but it might be Hitler’s ghost that holds him back.