The Germans have been troublemakers in Europe ever since the various German States were allowed to unify in a Reich.
Up until now, the trouble-making has had a distinct military flavor, but, being a very inventive people, the Gerry Leaders have found a new way to disrupt the equilibrium of Europe – with a dash of Herb Of Obama from the Feckless Plant thrown in.
From The Weekly Standard, Christopher Caldwell writing, we learn [tip of the fedora to Instapundit]:
It is almost all German chancellor Angela Merkel’s fault. In August she made a big mistake. Refugees who had once hoped to wait out the Syrian war in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey had been losing patience and started trickling into Europe. By this summer, traffickers had built a profitable streamlined route that could efficiently accommodate millions of clients/migrants. In August, Merkel announced that Germany would probably accept 800,000 Syrians this year. Syrians—and most anyone who believed he could pass for Syrian—took that as an invitation. The government estimate has been steadily revised upwards, and the new figure stands at 1.5 million.
The result is a rupture between politicians and publics that has spread across Central Europe….
…
The September crisis at Volkswagen came at a terrible time for Merkel. Arguably Germany’s most prestigious company, VW was found to have installed sensors in its vehicles that would systematically underreport noxious emissions. It is largely because of confidence in Germany’s expertise and probity that Merkel has been entrusted with the final say over Europe’s monetary and economic policy. Merkel similarly leaned on Germany’s reputation when she unilaterally announced what Europe’s migrant policy would be. But once German business figures were discredited and their honesty called into question, Germany’s neighbors began to wonder if their own leaders were being taken to the cleaners.
Austria is among the more credulous and contented members of the EU. Its elite newspaper Die Presse has a regular section—not a column, a section—called “Deepening Europe.” A heart-rending incident over the summer in which 71 migrants were found dead in an abandoned freezer truck on the A4 motorway left Austrians even less inclined to rock the EU boat. No one wants to gripe at such a moment.
But for Germany’s Central European neighbors, there was something unnerving about the way Merkel had made her pitch to the world’s huddled masses. Under the EU’s so-called Dublin regulations, passed in stages starting in 1997, refugees must apply for asylum in the first EU country they enter. Germany is nearly landlocked, and Middle Easterners need visas to fly into it. So Merkel’s invitation worked the way a lot of humanitarian philanthropy works: She got the reputation for “generosity.” But it was Germany’s EU neighbors, whose names the avid fortune-seekers couldn’t even remember, who shared the cost of Merkel’s million-man march.
Merkel accompanied her invitation with the insistence that the Dublin regulation was “broken,” and that Germany was not going to stand on bureaucratic ceremony. In this she resembled Barack Obama waiving Affordable Care Act provisions. She also said, “Wir schaffen das,” a rough German equivalent of “Yes, we can.” Nonetheless, the existence of the Dublin regulation pushed other EU countries into lawless habits. Larger-than-ever waves of asylum-seekers, claiming to be headed for Germany, began appearing at the southern border of Greece. Were the Greeks supposed to incur the responsibility for feeding these German invitees by registering them as asylum-seekers? Not likely! Greece was too broke—and it was broke because Germany had spent the winter pitilessly enforcing payment of a foolish debt plan that Germany had drawn up for it.
So Greece, standing at the outside border of the European Union, essentially waved the migrants in, assuming that the wider you open the doors, the sooner your guests will leave. The assumption was correct. These “asylum-seekers,” having found safety in the EU, now exited the EU into Macedonia, passed through Serbia, and then reentered the EU in Croatia or Hungary. But that just extended the Dublin dilemma to the next country. Who was going to record the entry of these migrants? Hungary tried to do it, but the asylum-seekers were convinced, perhaps rightly, that they would be foolish to have their claim adjudicated there. Austria, perhaps the most orderly country in Europe, itself stopped registering those who entered its national space, pleading logistical impossibility. In the old days, Austria would have said migrants who couldn’t enter in an orderly way couldn’t enter at all. Most wanted to wait until arriving in Germany to apply for asylum. At reception centers in towns on the Hungarian border, Austria loaded these travelers onto buses to Vienna’s Westbahnhof. From there they were sent on trains to Salzburg on the German border, or some place with available beds in between. Neither the interior nor the defense ministry published clear records of how many migrants were sent onward. The combination of Merkel’s invitation and the Dublin rules had created a cataract of corruption that was flowing from south to north.
How could it not? Citizens of all the tiny countries that lie between the Middle East and Germany were witnessing a migration far too big for Germany to handle. They knew Germany would eventually realize this, too. Once Germany lost its nerve, the huge human chain of testosterone and poverty would be stuck where it was. And if your country was smaller than Germany—Austria, for instance, is a tenth Germany’s size—you could wind up in a situation where the majority of fighting-age men in your country were foreigners with a grievance.
…
There is something in this that reminds one of the financial crisis of 2008. Like a too-big-to-fail bank, Merkel has made a bet that will allow her to pocket the credit if she succeeds and spread the baleful consequences to others if she fails. It appears now that she is going to fail. Her defenders exult that she is showing a different face of Germany than the one the world knows from the last century of its history. It is premature to say so. Merkel is showing the face of a Germany that is acting unilaterally, claiming superior moral authority, and answering those who object by saying they’ll thank her for this someday. As such, she is dragging the whole European continent towards unrest. No German role is older.
Of course, America is nowhere to be found in these matters because our Caesar has declared the Pax Americana null and void.
So, for the first time since the end of World War II, Germany has been left on it’s own, without a ‘forceful’ guidance from the British and/or Americans and it has FUBAR’d the whole situation, with the result that the answer to the question posed by Glenn Reynolds in his post [‘THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS IS JUST A NOVEL, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS?’] is ‘Not. Any. More’.
Who knew that, in the end, the Quisling Government would become the role model for Germany and most of Europe?
…“Are we the government of France,” he began, “assembled in extraordinary session with His Excellency, the President of the Republic, to discuss, humanely, a drama that has no precedent since deep in the Middle Ages? A drama that shows the way to man’s loftiest transformation, as he stands, at last, at this hour of materialism’s ultimate upheaval? Or are we some petty village council, called by the mayor to tighten the ban against gypsies camping on our public lands?”
The speaker was Jean Orelle [Nobel laureate in literature, Minister of Information]. The President, rather sheepish, felt obliged to soften his attack. “Aha! My thoughts exactly,” he said. “My very words to the council last year, during the general strike: ‘Gentlemen, are we the government of France?’ And later, too, when we had to devalue the franc.” Satisfied with his defense, he added, “Please, Monsieur Orelle, continue.”
Whereupon the wind of the past rose up from across the ages, gathering all the derelict fleets, the prophetic peoples, the militant armies, the nations drunk on trumpets and drums, the Kingdoms of God, and sweeping them off toward the calm and fathomless deeps, where even the boldest of storms will blow themselves out in the end. Its great historic gusts pushed back the slumping shoulders, raised up the bowed heads circling the Elysian table, and turned all eyes toward the vast perspective of humanity unbounded. Proof, once again, that when the mind is minute and the heart misplaced, we have to invent a soul to answer for all our foul transgressions…
…”The spirit of France, her particular genius,” minister Jean Orelle went on, “has always guided her path through the great waves of modern thought, like the noble flagship whose instinct shows her the way to go, as she plies resolutely forward, colors flying for all to see, at the head of the fleet of enlightened nations, setting their course, now left, now right, showing them how to sail into the storms spawned by the great compassionate gales of human progress …”
And so the thinking machine whined on, guaranteed authentic, hundred percent Orelle, last word in modern technology, with chrome-plated psyche, plastic-coated, rustproof, antidoubt brain, and prefab heart clicking its clockwork claptrap a mile a minute, available on easy budget terms, perfected model for high-class personnel, and special reinforced model, ultra de luxe, for millionaire social lions and potentates of the press.
“Could we get to the point?” the President mumbled, discreetly winking at the stenotypist to keep the remark off the record.
The point was finally reached a quarter of an hour later, but only after a stratospheric flight beginning at feudalism’s dying gasp, through the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, state-run education, the antifascist gains of ‘36, the liberation of Paris, the liberation of Algiers, Third World relief, and French-style socialism. “Gentlemen,” said the minister, “what difference does it make if this fleet, heading west, inching its way through our conscience with its last ounce of strength, like a dying indictment, lands on the shores of France, or Germany, or England? What difference indeed? All the privileged nations must stand up as one, must lend one solemn ear to the eternal question, ‘Cain, where is Abel thy brother … What hast thou done …?’ Can any among you fail to perceive that France owes it to herself to respond in a clear, compassionate voice, and to plan a heartfelt welcome, here and now, in keeping with both our material wealth and our moral resources? At the moment of truth, how urgent it will be to know how to read the signs and symbols, and master our own selfish interests!”
Ah yes, what a lovely tune! How that breed puffs and struts when there’s nothing to do but sing! These days, with its swelling cliché chorus, how expert it is in feigning concern without taking a stand; in basking in the trumpet’s blare while marking time in place; in pouring out into the street to beat the drum for the revolution, yet never leaving the pavement hallowed with a single corpse for a single cause; in cherishing its heroic illusions, bought for a song! In no time the Council of Ministers gave their approval. Plan a welcome? Why not! With the universe all eyes and ears, think how awed and impressed it would be!
—The Camp Of The Saints, Chapter Sixteen [re-paragraphing mine]
