Ghost of a flea: An unhappy Germany

? To think we can change the Earth | Main | Ezekiel 38:7 ?

May 23, 2010

An unhappy Germany

Theodore Dalrymple offered a strategy for the resurrection of German nationalism. Now Victor Davis Hanson runs with the ball.

Very soon German workers are going to grasp that all the financial reserves they piled away the last two decades from not doing what a Spain or Italy did are essentially gone. Someone in Munich worked 40 hours a week until age 67 for someone in Athens not to — and for someone in Athens to demand that someone in Munich do so or else. The idea that nations like Greece, both overtly and implicitly, insult nations like Germany has no basis in historical terms.

Nor should it. I am a great admirer of Germany, as it happens. The trick is to develop a natural, confident nationalism in place of the disintegrating nullity that is European citizenship. Past internationalist efforts to nullify the German character have tended to foster the worst of that which they would supress. In Germany, as anywhere, we must consider the return of the repressed.

It isn't that work or the status quo. It is that work or Götterdämmerung in an Islamic Germany or a new, nuclear armed Nazism.

For a less alarmist take, consider Whiskey's prophecy of a Greater Switzerland.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at May 23, 2010 08:47 AM