At the end of World War Two Germany had twice tried to conquer the world, or at least significant chunks of it. And twice, Germany failed. The project of militarily imposing German will on the entire planet was an absurd one, a fantasy based on late unification and a very late arrival to the era of European imperialism. Germany came to the imperial party just as the lights were going out and everyone was trudging home, then somehow imagined that it could achieve in a few short years what took the Spanish, the French and the British centuries to build.
There was always something deeply insecure in the German race to catch up and overtake its European rivals, a frantic psychological component which existed both before and after the full schizophrenic episode of Nazism. If we look at the two European nations from which the worst excesses of 20th century tyranny were formed, Germany and Russia, (Nazism and Communism), we see two nations with vast resources which had nonetheless long been peripheral in many ways to European greatness, overshadowed by the earlier successes of Spain and Portugal, and by the wider successes of France and Britain.
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Just as with individuals, embittered and insecure nations in a rush to assert their significance, are more dangerous than long established or long successful ones secure in their identity.
But what the failure of German militarism proved is just how impossible the old routes to power had become. The age of conquerors was dying. Even the enormously powerful new colossus of the United States, after World War Two, would find its record of successful war after that conflict rather sparse. Despite the 800 or more military bases, despite the perpetual war policies, despite the trillions of dollars of investment in military budgets, the US could be embarrassed by Communist rice farming peasants in Vietnam or by Iron Age religious savages in Afghanistan.
What hope, then, for militarism in Germany, which started World War Two with the most prepared, bloodied, experienced and dedicated troops in Europe, led by some of the most innovative and brilliant generals, and ended it in shattered ruins and utter humiliating defeat?
A Germany which had deeply resented military limits and imperial limits imposed at the end of World War One, enthusiastically embraced self-limitation after World War Two. Clearly, Germany was not going to try to impose itself militarily on its neighbours. It certainly wasn’t going to be suffused with a semi-mystical sense of Aryan destiny and German greatness. If anything, it entered into a long orgy of self-hatred, its new insecurities the exact opposite of the ones which had fuelled its military ambitions. Germans became Europe’s most enthusiastic self-deniers, deeply suspicious of nationalism, and determined to expunge their War Guilt by plunging into internationalism and every bureaucratic and modish replacement cause imaginable.
But again it was a curious mix driven by insecurities. Germany was home of a postwar industrial miracle soon making it an industrial powerhouse again. It reclaimed the German reputation for efficiency and hard work. But it also developed paternalistic working attitudes that made Germans almost as unsackable as French or Italian workers. It was content with its reduced Army and with ex Allied WWII opponents being camped on its soil. But it was soon once again bullying its neighbours and imposing its will, this time through its funding of and dominance within the EU, sometimes to the extent of sparking resentments harking back to its Nazi period-as we saw for instance with Greeks furious at German and EU interference during their economic troubles.
The German might now be a curious pedant insisting on a standard measurement for all bananas, or a Green fanatic in an unfashionable jumper, or a diligent pen pusher in some corporate or bureaucratic environment where no military uniform would ever intrude, but he was still a bit of a control freak. And of course if he was in Eastern Germany until the fall of that regime, he was still learning the lessons that come with actual tyranny.
The awkwardness of the synthesis and the curiousness of 20th century German experience and psychology was perhaps best manifested in the person of long term Chancellor Angela Merkel. Merkel was raised under East German Communism and retained a lifelong rather Communist fashion sense. She was dour, humourless, plain, a dumpy hausfrau without a scintilla of human warmth. She achieved a similar sternness to Margaret Thatcher, and a similar political dominance within her home nation, but with none of the sparkle and surprising femininity that those who interacted with Thatcher often reported. She was as blunt and unlovable as a brick, but Germans saw strength and solidity there.
Everything that worries a Brit or a Yank about bureaucracy, offers a warm blanket of comfort for Germans. If it comes with a form in triplicate, it must be sensible, respectable, and safe. Germans were likely to demand more rules regarding the acceptable length and shape of a banana, rather than regard the whole thing as absurd. Merkel was a skilled politician, but at heart happiest as a bureaucrat.
And few people have manifested the contradictions of modern anarcho-tyranny globalism so well as Merkel did, being always ready to suffocate Germans beneath ever greater legal restrictions whilst simultaneously inviting the wild savages of the world to descend on Germany in (literally) rapacious hordes.
The insecure instinct for dominance and tyranny militarism makes obvious and faces outwards, towards the conquest of foreign nations, did not leave Germany and German psychology at all. Not even Nazism’s gotterdammerung could expunge it. Instead it turned into the inwards meddling of restrictive bureaucracy and the on the surface of things peaceful and consensual march of transnational bodies into every public and private sphere. Germans were as bluntly unsympathetic to those resisting EU demands as they were towards those who once resisted panzer divisions, both at home and abroad.
All of this is by way of providing context for developments today and a truly chilling and important article by the popular Substacker Eugyppius. https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=268621&post_id=141755263&utm_source=cross-post&utm_campaign=1032096&isFreemail=true&r=1dh1hq&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo4MzA5NjI3MCwicG9zdF9pZCI6MTQxNzU1MjYzLCJpYXQiOjE3MDgyMDE1MTcsImV4cCI6MTcxMDc5MzUxNywiaXNzIjoicHViLTI2ODYyMSIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.Zs9lvwaIZRANK3vPNvoEz1gwORZBH-HrOe_ya-9TtZg
I don’t often provide links or direct recommendations, but in this instance the article is so important I felt that I should. I urge everyone to read it because what Eugyppius describes in it is the template of modern tyranny, even moreso then the COVID measures we saw in 2020-22 and the lawfare we see in the US against Trump. It’s the European model of the Chinese Communist State, and it is truly terrifying and foul.
Eugyppius doesn’t have to uncover secret documents, expose hidden facts, or provide hitherto obscure information. He shows us in the direct words of current German officials where they stand, and where we stand. Almost everything he describes is official German policy and thought, expressed by current German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, of the respectable, mainstream SPD party.
And it’s pure tyranny.
Ostensibly the press conference that Eugyppius references was about ‘fighting far right extremism’. Actually it was about justifying the complete removal of all basic rights to free speech, free thought and free political association from the German people.
Faeser argues that ‘far right networks’ should be treated like terrorist organisations or Mafia style criminal conspiracies. But she and people like her are going to define what these ‘far right’ groups are. And they are, by the definitions she gives, anyone who wants to vote for parties she doesn’t approve (especially the AfD which is the second most popular party in Germany). Far right networks are anyone who attends a conference or a lecture or shares an internet clip she doesn’t like. Far right networks are millions of ordinary voters with views she doesn’t share. Far right networks are people who think the wrong thoughts. This is not my interpretation. She announces this in her own words.
The definition of far right is broad and flexible enough to simply designate anyone they want it to designate. Anyone who argues against the policies of the German State. Anyone who mocks the State or its policies. Anyone who opposes anything!
And how will these people be treated? Imprisonment. Seizure of assets and bank accounts. Removal from the public sphere. The definition of the allowable response is again broad and vague enough to include pretty much anything and reverse any and all existing civil liberties.
All based on crimes of wrongthink and all by the curious reversal of describing enforcing total control as protecting Democracy.
What Germany today openly declares, is the model the western world is embarked on as a whole. Once again, Germany wants tyranny. And this is a far more real threat than Vladimir Putin.