You're Hitler Obsession and Germanophobia Is Getting In the Way Of Understanding the World, My Friends

The election of Germany's new chancelor is healthy development for Europe and democracy

Gosh golly, if only there were someone out there who could have warned you that J.D. Vance was entirely in the bag for the Russians?

Oh wait. That was me!

"Clear and Present Danger" to American Interests: Why I Leaked J.D. Vance's Text Messages

Didn’t I tell you that I was the target of a retribution campaign by the allies of J.D. Vance?

And yet I don’t entirely think that all is lost. Don’t you get the sense that Vance and Trump were doing a bit of the old bad cop good cop routine?

The Trump administration is forcing our European allies and even Canada to reconsider their political trajectories.

An American general friend of mine said quite rightly that the failure of a lot of America’s approach to Europe has been our willingness to outsource our European policy to Angela Merkel.

It’s provocative argument and not one without some measure of truth. After all, Merkel was always a lot closer to Putin than she let on. You can look upon her silly strategy of mass importation of Muslims as equal parts cynical as it was necessary. The German economy runs on slaves.

If Russia increasingly uses migration as a weapon maybe you lie to yourself and say that immigration isn’t really all that bad at all. Doesn’t the German economy need workers? Indeed Alternative für Deutschland’s very name is itself a rebuke of Merkel’s supposed lack of alternatives — Alternativlosigkeit — to her autocratic rule. Migration is a fact of life, right? Those Turkish workers and Ukrainian prostitutes are just don’t the jobs that German men and women increasingly won’t do — working and screwing.

And yet a way I have chosen to see the Ukraine War isn’t as pedestrian as Russia against Ukraine or even “The West” against Russia but as Russia and America against Germany. Looking closer there’s a malaise, a depression in the souls of Germanfolk.

One of my favorite German words is Weltschmerz, literally world pain. It’s the sadness you feel when you compare the way the world is to the way you wish it to be. Germany has been totally on the back foot. No winds of change, or Zeitenwender, notwithstanding the marketing campaign.

Some years ago I made the slow trek of reading Thilo Sarrazin’s 2010 book, Germany Abolishes Itself: How We're Putting Our Country in Jeopardy (Deutschland schafft sich ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen). (I read German decently though speaking it is an entirely a different matter. Nicht gut!)

What seemed far-fetched then now seems prophetic. Germany is abolishing itself — and collapsing. But why? They have no reason to exist.

To listen to American neoconservatives or our Vice President J.D. Vance — but I repeat myself — the problem is Europe’s unwillingness to patrol its own borders. Europe’s threat come from within, he told an audience in Munich. He blamed migration but the real problem is vision.

Germany’s economy is in serious disarray. Its economic model of Russian cheap gas, cheap slaves from Eastern Europe and high end car sales to China seems as if it’s over at last. Much of that model was a fraud and would collapse upon closer inspection but in the heady days of the Merkelocracy you could be forgiven for thinking that Wirecard was a real tech company. I sometimes wonder if America was, in effect, blackmailing Chancellor Olaf Scholz over the payment processing fraud. Wasn’t he always a continuation of Merkel’s governance too?

And how shall we think of German-born Peter Thiel’s connections to the Wirecard scandal? He was, after all, a close friend of Christian Angermayer who brokered the deal.

Neither America, nor China nor Russia wanted that German-led world. America wants the Europeans jointly developing technology with us and not French-German alliances with Airbus. China wants the world buying BYD electric cars. Russia desperately wants a higher price for its gas, especially now that President Trump and soon to be Prime Minister Pierre Poilievre favor a policy of oil and gas exploration.

France, seizing the post-Brexit moment where their agent Nigel Farrage and his French girlfriend, sees a chance to run from German domination. In much the same way as you know who was in fact Austrian, Merz is, in point of fact, half a French Huguenot. Oh là là! Brilon, where Merz was born, is arguably more Rhinelander than it is Germany. This time France invades Germany?

When you study European history you’re taught that all these marriages and secret alliances governed medieval Europe. Isn’t it obvious that a lot of those things are still in effect?

Merz is a Catholic and Catholic Germans always proved the most resistant to Heir Hitler’s Nazi appeal. (See generally The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945 (2015) or Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010).

Merz’s considerable squabbles with Merkel betray a smarter politics. He might actually be the alternative for Germany. He called for immigrants to Germany to accept the liberal German Leitkultur way back in 2000. How different is that from Donald Trump’s appeal that immigrants assimilate into American life?

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Germany is ageing. Its median age makes it one of the oldest in the world at 46.1 years old.

There’s a real question of whether or not Germany will keep its status as the world’s third largest economy.

While Japan’s Mitsubishi has partnered with Aptera and LAND Motors is working with Honda there isn’t a compelling vision of what the German economy might look like. Gone are the days where Nazi Germany’s airplane manufacturers became the German Republic’s car companies.

To the extent that America has any vision at all for Germany it is that it should spend more money on militarism — as if that worked out so well in the past. It was pretty gross to see J.D. Vance browbeat Europe after Vance’s own dalliances with Nazism. Isn’t Vance an investor in the military industrial complex’s Anduril? Huh.

Of course there are a lot of professional tut tutters. OK.

You’re going to hear a lot about how terrible it was that Alternative für Deutschland placed second. But last I checked East Germany was chock-a-block with losers.

To be sure something does seem to be stirring in Germany. An Asian-American woman I cared about greatly was dating an attorney for AfD and the relationship descended into stalking and even allegations of human trafficking.

“The Germans are doing it again,” she averred.

But are they really? You need to be fit and focused for Fascism and they are flabby and disappointing.

Germany’s democracy will defang the immigration issue by working harder to crack down on illegal migration. But more likely the German economy will see to it that the migrations pursue more fertile pastures and humming factories.

In Tùrkiye lots of German expats are living in these retirement communities, drinking themselves to death with cheap beer.

On the Israel question Merz is somewhat hopeless — Germany sends the most weapons to Israel of any country, after America — and he is reportedly close to rabbi Yehuda Teichtal, who is a Chabad rabbi.

How much is this typical German politesse and how much this is conviction I leave to more attentive observers. Were I a part of the German Greens I’d hold out over this Israel issue before agreeing to any coalition with Merz.

But the Volksdeutsche isn’t confined merely to the territory of the Federal Republic. You know who kept very detailed lists of the world’s Germans and it stands to reason that America or Canada would not be exempt from such German lists. Oftentimes it’s the Germans outside of Germany who wanted to prove themselves more German than the Fatherland. So it seems with Elon’s grandfather Joe Haldeman.

Yes, Elon is a Nazi and So Is Bibi But Mike and Donald Are Americans

As Germany goes, so go the world’s Germans. Our most famous German-American — the South African-born Elon Musk — weighed in on the AfD — and provoked a sharp rebuke from the now chancellor. Just what precisely Merz will do, I can’t say, but it seems serious.

Musk is nevertheless correct: If everyone is responsible for World War II, no one really is. Musk is, like most modern Nazis, a fan of the ethno-state of Israel which you’re never supposed to talk about being an outpost of Nazism. You’re supposed to ignore books like Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers or how similar the language between Hitler and Netanyahu really is. Who could hear how Netanyahu talks about the Armenians (or as he calls them “Amalek”) and not conclude that he is invoking Hitler?

Did you know that Hitler has a relative living in Israel? You should study this stuff more closely.

Watch.

Isn’t it obvious that Musk is continuing the Nazi eugenics programs right into the present moment?

The Nazis were obsessed with IVF — you could, in effect, double or triple the fighting force if every pregnancy had multiple children — and those eugenics ideas certainly seem to have taken root in Israel itself.

Maybe the history of World War II isn’t quite so simple as Jews victims, Germans aggressors, Russian and Americans heroes.

No, not quite.

Could it be that our obsession with World War II arguments and aesthetics makes it harder for us to be good people in the here and now?

The once and future king Merz has returned to the throne, blocked by Merkel back in 2000, he can make Germany great again but only if he resists the nonsense.

We could have had a stronger Germany had Merz ascended back in 2000.

Oh well. Better late than never.

Merz and Merkel in 2001 — right after she blocked his ascent.