Two years ago, the Chancellor of Germany, without consulting her fellow Europeans, or her fellow regional governors, decided to open Germany’s, and hence Europe’s, borders to millions of economic migrants who were mostly illiterate, innumerate, could not speak German or any other European language, had no trades, no skills, and had arrived mysteriously fit and aggressive at Mediterranean ports or eastern European borders after what must have been gruelling 1,200-mile journeys (at least) from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Nigeria and all points African and Middle Eastern.
The Chancellor did this despite the warnings, she must have received from her own intelligence services, about the low economic value of these young men, the fact that they had been recruited, transported by truck and lorry to the ports and borders by NGOs, and that they had been sent to Europe to farm for welfare benefits. Europe’s intelligence services are staffed by smart people: they must have worked out that communities all over those countries were sending Europe their lazy, angry, crazy, surplus, and criminal. Just as Castro sent the US his criminals, AIDs victims, long-term sick and other undesirables (as he saw it). They would have briefed the German Chancellor, and the EU, on this possibility.
A politician works for their constituents first, their fellow citizens second, and anyone else a very distant third. The job of governments is not to tell citizens how to live, and what they can and cannot say, do or believe. The duties of a government are to defend those people and their families against violence and exploitation, and then to advance their interests. It does not matter if the exploitation is the so-called Gig Economy and zero-hours contracts, or by migrants sent to farm welfare benefits, or whether the violence comes from men from another country wearing uniforms, or men from another country without uniforms beating and raping women. The German Chancellor failed in that duty. Victor Orban of Hungary did not. Neither did David Cameron, whom we may assume listened to the brief by his intelligence services, and refused to take large numbers of the fake Syrian refugees.
The German Chancellor’s act was one of sheer political brute force: she had the power to dump disaffected, violent and unemployable young men all over Europe, and she did so. Because power means nothing if it is not exercised arbitrarily from time to time. It was a message to the EU that Germany would do whatever its Chancellor wanted to do, that she could and would on a whim ignore her duties to the electorate, and that the EU would pay for it as well. She dared the EU to reprimand her, and it did not. She dared her own politicians to reprimand her, and they did not. When ordinary people started to complain, she turned the media companies into her censors. Her response to the outrage felt by ordinary European people at the invasion of 2015 was to make it a crime to express that outrage. Arrogance masked by righteousness.
So-called Liberals and other assorted “Good People” show a genuine righteous arrogance when they suppose that it is their job, and the government’s job, to make the electorate “better people”. It was a New Labour strategy to "rub the Right's nose in diversity” with indiscriminate immigration in the Oughties. One has to assume the was some gerrymandering intended as well. Now those “Good People” are smugly watching what they think is the train wreck of Brexit, thus showing no understanding of the cunning of reason. We can only be thankful that none of them have the ability to act with the same reckless and malicious brute force as the German Chancellor.
This righteous arrogance is why I want dump a basket of wet fish over the heads of many editorialists at the Financial Times, the Economist and other formerly august media institutions. It’s not their job to be on the right side of history, but it’s not smart to be so smugly on the wrong side either. A little self-awareness would help.
Having understood that it’s a wholly pointless anger about the arrogance and smugness (“Good People”) or hypocrisy (the German Chancellor) of politicians who refuse to do their job, and the media who fail to hold them to account for that failure, I’m now going to stop with the politics. This and the previous CUPID post are it. Prepare for lots of posts on things mundane, artistic or otherwise of a man with a life.
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