Who's Whom

The callous indifference shown by German Chancellor Angela Merkel (indeed, of the entire German elite, which moves in lock-step) for average Germans in visiting upon them hordes of young Muslim men so she can stake her claim to secular sainthood defies understanding. Does the West, and Germany, now have a new kind of elite, or is what we see merely the same old elite, adapted to the present?

For a long time after World War II we were told how the Nazi terror and the Holocaust were the result of a fatal flaw in the German character, a devotion to order and weakness for authority. A cliche this shop-worn has to be false in large part if not in whole--nothing so complex can have such a pat explanation, and this one in particular seems too ideally suited to the vanity of the victors and too useful for post-WWII cultural Marxism (and just plain Marxism). It reeks of the "authoritarian personality" myth.

Besides, our experience here in America tells us there's a big difference between the behaviors and motivations of the elite and those of the common man. We're told, for instance, that we must take in the refugees of Middle Eastern wars because they're "our" fault. But none of our military meddling in the region has anything like a popular origin; even the Second Gulf War (which the neocons had been long planning before 9/11 and the false specter of "WMD") was only effected by a massive misinformation project launched in the trauma following 9/11, and the people, weary of war, voted Barack Obama in largely to correct that mistake. The people spoke--and were betrayed. The wars continue under the rudderless foreign policy of the Obama Administration. Of course, the great migratory invasion of 2015 looks less and less like the mass outpouring of war refugees than it is one of opportunists, responding to cliear signalling by European elites that the gates are open and they are welcome. In the same breath, the elite lies to the people, and winks suggestively at the invaders.

Yet the people are still guilt-tripped by that same elite to acquiesce to this latest project--taking in a massive influx of "refugees"--as atonement for our acquiescing to their previous, and ongoing, wars and foreign interventions. Do they ever get together, say at Bilderberger, and have a good laugh at the shit they get away with? No wonder they disdain us.
If you should ever have the good fortune to be within arm's reach of a verified member of the political elite and he tells you "we" must take in the refuse of the neocons' wars, I urge you to avail yourself of the unprecedented opportunity to slap him and demand "what do you mean 'we', asshole?"

So the common man can be excused if much of the behavior of the elite seems to him to be motivated at times by indifference, at others disdain, for his concerns. But mostly the common man, still, shows a remarkable passivity in the face of elite mismanagement and bigotry. We keep letting it happen, and their attitude keeps getting more disdainful, more dismissive.

But what of the German elite, which seems farther gone than any in its determined delusion? Is it that the German people are so different or flawed, or is it that the German elite is different, flawed? Germany was after all not fifty years into unification under Bismarck when the First World War broke out, having so recent a history of having been divided into countless principalities, and arguably hasn't returned to anything like a normal development process since.

Now we see an elite there that appears nothing so much as to lack maturity. Look at its confused, irresponsible romanticism, as some openly suggest absorbing the refugee invasion is the means of absolving the nation (not finally, be sure) of the sins of the Holocaust. If Germany's unique history makes its elite even more contemptuous of its people than other Western elites, one shudders to think just how far they might take this madness. But no one seems to be asking.

Goethe famously said of the Germans that they were "so estimable in the individual, so wretched in the generality." (I could say the same for our current American elites, who are no doubt fine and decent people when taken singly.)

From Gordon Craig's (so-so) history of Germany, The Germans:

"In looking at the careers of these three industrial giants, one is hard put to discover any trace of nobility or generosityof spirit. It has been said of [Alfred] Krupp that he never spent a penny on the arts or the sciences or the poor or the community, and this was no less true of [Hugo] Stinnes and [Friederich] Flick. Krupp gave Prussia no prior claim on his weapons and cheerfully sold his most dangerously efficient ones to powers that might use them against his fellow Germans. Stinnes made a reputation as a patriot by this defiant speeches at Spa about what would happen to the French if they tried to exact reparations by force; but, when the French did precisely that, three years later, by marching into the Ruhr, he not only profited from the ensuing inflation, which he sought to prolong by refusing financial assistance to  his hard-pressed government, but also did his best to to conclude mutually profitable deals with French concerns. As for Flick, there is no evidence of national concern in any of his undertakings."

Is the "fatal flaw" in German character less the peoples' willingness to follow its leaders than its leaders' indifference and disdain for the people? The flip-side of a romantic, sentimental view of a people, such as that Hitler at least pretended to have for Germans, is a pitiless contempt, particularly if one sees that people as weak or inadequate. I recently provided a quote attributed to Hitler near the end of WWII:

"If the war is lost the people will be lost also. It is not necessary to worry about what the German people will need for elementary survival. On the contrary, it is best for us to destroy those things. For the people has proven itself to be the weaker, and the future belongs exclusively to the stronger people of the East. Those who will survive this struggle will in any case be inferiors, for the good are already dead."

Sounds familiar to any American used to the experience of an elite that has gone from speaking in fawning, dishonest platitudes while acting in preening self-interest (how many times have we been told something the elite wants--like open borders--is what "makes America great"?) to occasionally breaking out in ranting contempt when stymied at all by popular will (what makes America great has nothing to do with Americans, it seems now, who only stand in the way of her realizing that greatness through immigrants).

And if Germans are more disposed toward acquiescing to authority, isn't the real tragedy incumbent upon that only realized when authority misleads, betrays or otherwise fails them? If a people are as thrifty, industrious and law-abiding as the Germans are said to be, it follows that all they need to thrive is responsible and capable leadership. It strikes me that the myth of Germans fatally disposed to following elite authority serves, ironically, no one so much as the elite group in authority.