Disgusted by the Germans

For the last thirty years I have devoted my energies to defending the German people against a variety of charges directed against them by their leftist and neoconservative critics in the US and Germany. Many of the points that I’ve raised about the historical past don’t have to be amended, because they continue to be true, e.g., about the Allied responsibility for the outbreak of World War One,  the silliness of looking for Nazi ideas throughout the German past, and the brilliance of German philosophical and literary accomplishments. Nothing that is now occurring would cause me to revise my critical judgments about the grossly unjust Treaty of Versailles, the terror bombing of German cities during the last year of World War Two, the arrogant stupidity of the post-World War Two re-education of the German people carried out by the “Western democracies” and the kangaroo court held in Nuremberg in 1946 and 1947. These are not things that I feel impelled to reconsider.

What I am changing my mind about is whether the Germans are totally blameless for the antifascist horror into which they’ve descended. As German friends tell me, what transpired on New Year’s Eve, when over a thousand Near Eastern Muslims attacked 121 women near the central train station in Cologne, tore off their clothes and in some cases began to rape them, is only the “tip of the iceberg.” There have been hundreds of other incidents of violenceto have killed but never did.

It is entirely possible that Germans act as they do because as one young American friend who is studying in Germany noted: “They follow their leaders, right over the cliff.” Although this explanation may be drawing on unfair stereotypes, the person who offered it is far from an inveterate German hater. He went to study at a German university because of his deep respect for the humanistic accomplishments of mostly dead Germans. But Germans of the present generation have embraced a lunatic, antifascist ideology, and they have done so with a moral intensity that is characteristically German. Other nations do not act in this way, at least not to the same degree.

Claiming this behavior is due to the forced re-education inflicted on Germans after World War Two and to the bad self-image that Germans took away from the Nuremberg show trials is not entirely credible. World War Two ended in 1945 and Germany is no longer an occupied country. If the Germans stopped waging war on themselves as a people, the American army would not likely reinvade their territory. In fact except for a handful of German-hating journalists and academics, who are located exclusively between Boston and D.C., most people wouldn’t even notice if the Germans became a self-respecting nation again. Perhaps they could start by closing their borders to migrants. They might also think about filling their universities with academics who don’t loathe their country’s entire existence up until the moment the Allies occupied it.

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