While summering in Germany at the age of 12, a person I was visiting mentioned something about his countrymen. “Germans are always 100 percent,” he said. He was referencing how, by his lights, they were a monolithic lot. This isn’t literally true. But what is surely correct is that Germans can be “100 percent” in applying themselves to endeavors — and to beliefs. Thus did they pioneer modern educational developments. Thus were they ground breakers in optics, brewing, and industrial engineering. Thus do the Germanic Amish likely lead the world in pacifism, with their 100-percent devotion to it.
And thus are the Germans perhaps now also at the forefront of a darker development: the decline of the West.
In fact, their devotion to woke agendas such as greentopianism, hate-speech regimes, secularism, cultural relativism, and Western self-flagellation may be unrivaled the Occident over.
“Slow-motion Suicide”
Reporting on this recently was history professor Victor Davis Hanson. In a Daily Signal video, he discusses, as he puts it, “the crisis facing Europe.” He specifically addresses the old continent’s, quote, “self-implosion across the spectrum: energy, population, fertility, defense.” And using Germany as a quintessential case in point, he states that the nation
has been systematically shutting down its nuclear plants and, for a while, its natural gas electrical generation plants. It’s relying — believe it or not — more on oil and coal, but the net result of all of this deliberate turn to wind and solar at the expense of fossil fuels and nuclear is that it costs about four times more to use electricity in Germany than it does on average throughout the United States.
That’s not the only problem; Germany is de-industrializing, and by that, I mean it’s losing about 200,000 jobs in its auto industry due to these high energy prices and regulations. Its green mandates, especially electric vehicle mandates, have revolutionized the car industry in the sense that they’re not selling abroad as they did in the past. In addition to that, Germany’s disarmed; they only have about 125 attack aircraft, they have very few armored vehicles, their military—their active military—is only about 180,000 soldiers, and they have 84 million people in the country.
Hanson then also relates a few other problems:
- Germany’s fertility rate is near 1.4 children per woman (replacement level in 2.1) — its population is dying.
- While only the size of Montana, the country has two million illegal aliens.
- It has proportionately a higher foreign-born population (20 percent of the total) than the U.S. does. So Germans are being replaced, too.
As Goes Germany, So Goes Western Europe?
Hanson says this matters because “Germany represents the powerhouse, traditionally, of the European economy and even culture, and it’s starting to implode.” For instance, the euro, “the benchmark of European financial health,” Hanson writes, now equals only about one dollar. In 2008, it was worth almost 1.7.
Hanson then mentions an irony. Aiming to prevent yet another Germany-involved war, in WWII’s waning days then-Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau formulated a plan. It involved the de-industrialization and depopulation of Germany and the altering of its borders. The idea was to transform it into a completely agrarian society.
This plan was ultimately abandoned because wiser heads realized it would inspire the Germans to fight to the death. But, says Hanson, the Germans are now voluntarily visiting this fate upon themselves. They’re choosing a model of “deliberate de-industrialization, depopulation, disarmament, open borders— [and] destroyed borders,” he says. They are “undertaking a slow-motion suicide.”
It’s not just Hanson sounding this alarm, either. The Telegraph wrote last year that Germany is, in essence, descending into Third Worldism. Becoming a dysfunctional nation, even the famed stereotypical German punctuality has gone by the wayside. Only 52 percent of the country’s trains run on time.
That’s the least of its problems, however. Research last year found that almost half of Germany’s grade-nine Muslims believe Islamic theocracy is the best form of government. More than two-thirds say the Koran’s rules are more important than Germany’s laws. More than one-fifth believe that the “threat” the West poses to Islam justifies a violent response. And just last Thursday, a jihadist-minded Afghan asylee drove a car into a crowd in Munich, injuring 39 people.
At War
Realize, too, that ex-chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel, who authored massive Third World migration into her country, finally admitted in 2018 that Muslim-dominated “no-go zones” do exist. Despite this, what is Germany prioritizing? The bar graph below provides insight.
The above is likely no exaggeration, either. In fact, 60 Minutes just reported on how the German authorities are raiding people’s homes — for posting “offensive” speech online.
So the reality is that post-WWII-era policymakers were once worried Germany would again wage war. And it has — against itself.
Yet before anyone gets too smug, remember that this phenomenon plagues all of Western Europe, to one degree or another. Moreover, it’s not just something happening “over there.” Millions of “Americans” would visit these woke standards on us — if they could. Thus is it important to understand why this is happening.
Imagine There’s … Heaven
The problem is that, as commentator Bret Stephens once put it, Europeans believe in “shallow things, shallowly.” And the solution isn’t just to believe in deeper things, but in the deepest thing, deeply.
Just imagine that the Europeans (or us) sincerely believed, as they once did, in Christianity, which upholds Truth. Imagine they weren’t awash in the relativism currently pervading their civilization. So you don’t have to imagine too much, though, I’ll provide two examples (but only two, owing to space constraints).
The Europeans then couldn’t fall prey to religious/cultural relativism, the notion that all religions/cultures are morally equal. For they’d realize, instinctively, that since different religions/cultures espouse different values, they can’t all be equal unless all values are. And the “all values are equal” notion is relativism, which their Truth-based faith, Christianity, precludes.
The Europeans also wouldn’t embrace hate-speech laws, which often, as the earlier-cited chart illustrates, suppress unfashionable Truth. For their Truth-based faith, Christianity, would inspire them to discard not the Truth, but that which contradicts it.
Unfortunately, however, that kind of belief is now for moderns a psychological no-go zone. Their faith has died and, consequently, their cultures are terminally ill.
Addendum: The earlier-quoted Victor Davis Hanson video follows.
And as a bonus for those interested, below is a Thomas Sowell exposition on the traditional virtues of the Germans.
