Bad German
It just so happens that I have a very Anglicized German surname. As such, both its spelling and its pronunciation, post-alteration, happen to be be all messed up. I spoke of this on the massive hit episode of The Delingpod with the great James Delingpole.
Both my heritage and the unfortunate, historical mutilation of my last name got me to thinking about bad German. Not the language, which I happen to find sonorous and whose diction and vocabulary are reflections of a culture once aimed at getting to the good, the true, and the beautiful in the most direct and efficient ways available. In doing so, the Germans did not extirpate any of the mysticism in their tongues, be they Hanoverian or Bavarian. Not the food, that’s to be sure. Nothing bad there. Should one come to the end of life without having Tyrol schnitzel with dumplings and an Augustiner-Bräu, well, for you, poor soul, I can only mourn.
It is more so about the people. And throughout history, it seems to me, there are bad Germans and evil Germans. It is something of a paradox, but to be a “bad German” is to embrace all that is good about being German, while being an evil German is to detest what is essentially German while preferring things abjectly inferior, often foreign, but always artificial. So think of “bad Germans” in the sense of Michael Jackson’s album “Bad”–all connotation there, no denotation. “Bad” is real. “Bad” is tough. In all eras–but especially our present predicament–to be “schlecht” is indeed tough for the limp-wristed, the weak-willed, and the altogether phony to accept. The “baddies” among the Germans are less pliant, less submissive, more creative, more critical.
Perhaps the “baddest” of the Germans was not even a German at all, but an Angle–St. Boniface. Now, I know, I know some reading this will object that the Angles were simply Germans borne off to that gray island that the bard would later call that “earth, [that] realm, [that] England”, but even by the 8th century, England was essentially different from the Saxony of the Saxons who remained or the Frisia of the Frisians who clung to both their ancestral lands and gods with a near rabid provincialism. When Boniface encountered the Dorian oak just outside of Hesse, he did a very Germanic as well as authentically Catholic thing–he got to work chopping that arborous Tower of Babel to the ground. Props to the local chieftain who let it happen–after all, should this monk-bishop with his one God vanquish all the mighty Teutonic gods swirling about, then he and all the Germans would have to worship Him. Soteriologically practical. Souls, like trains, must run on time and end up in their proper destination. Before Boniface could complete the job, the Holy Spirit intervened and His indominable wind toppled the oak to the amazement of the “Volk“. Boniface built a church out of the pagan wood, dedicated it to St. Peter, and became the apostle to the Germans.
Modern Germans–those still in the fatherland and those in the diaspora–have clearly fallen prey to acting the part of the “evil German”. Not “schlecht” but rather “teuflisch” which is best translated into English as “devil-like”. They are simps, or they have let themselves be led by simps. They stand for nothing to such an extent that their vicious irenicism has forced them to accept the destruction of their culture and the destitution of their people. The Americans wish to fight a proxy war against Russia? Well, then they had to blow up the Nordstream pipeline. Sure, it was the most destructive act of eco-terrorism in history. Sure, it will cost Germany hundreds of billions of euros and relegate Germans in Northern and Alpine climes to do the sadly not-too-unfamiliar practice of burning books to stay warm in the future: In the end, its all worth it. All of the cost is fiat anyway (like in World War I and that worked out okay for us), and we should be relying on wind and solar anyway. We Germans are the last people on earth who ought to be victims of propaganda–we were the most pathetic victims of it in both World Wars and master-perpetrators of it, especially between them. Still, in the home of Bach, Beethoven, and Frederick Barbarossa, it is better to embrace a humiliating supplication to the antagonistic wishes of everyone who harbors a historic hatred of everything German–including incredibly, the food! Better to engage in the height of cognitive dissonance and historical ignorance and hold steadfast to the whimsies of American foreign policymakers. Bach, Beethoven, Barbarossa, and yes, Bismarck have nothing on Biden, of course.
Cultural self-loathing is a powerful toxin, and once taken, it is a hemlock almost without antidote. It has moved the German people to obscure reality. This unreality, thoroughly progressive in nature, has Germany ruled by other eco-, anti-human terrorists who go by the name, “greens”. It has Germans looking at their immanent demographic doomsday as both a necessary and deserved dusk that won’t be all too bad. A Germany without Germans. They do not even move their minds to the relevant and natural next question: Without all of the Germans there, against whom will migrant groups commit crimes? Already, the German Interior Ministry is reporting that 41 percent of all criminal suspects are foreigners while that same group comprises only 15 percent of the population. What is needed, though, concluded Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (“Nancy” is German for “Karen”) is greater spending from Berlin on “integration”. Good luck with that.
The World Wars, the Third Reich, and “Christian” Democratic Socialism represent the most proximate causes of German self-immolation. I would go so far as to say that once the majority of the German people espoused Luther’s demonic faith and rejected the mysticism of the True Church and true Germany, much more was lost. Gone was a sense of theosis; gone was a sense of co-agency with God’s grace. In other words, a fiat Christian faith made inevitable a fiat German worldview, replete with high time preference and a worthless mark, then euro. Odd, is it not, that the present-day Reich in Berlin supports and advances with equal vehemence and energy the same policies the Nazis pursued and implemented? So long as the intent is different, the act is redeemed, because disarming the populace, centralizing power, eliminating federalism, centralizing banking, and replacing God with the state will work wonders if only more euros are expended and people leave their antiquated traditions behind.
The remedies for the newest sick man of Europe are there to be had. A timely piece by economist Joseph Salerno appeared in the most recent issue of The Misesian. In it, Salerno chronicles the horrors that abounded from interbellum hyperinflation in Germany. A postmark that cost billions. Women prostituting themselves for cigars to be sold to buy bread. A retiree who had scrimped and saved to build a nest egg in old age only to have a Frankfurt bank close the account because it cost more to administer the account than what was left in it. The bigger point Salerno makes is that inflation kills the imagination, it kills the soul. Gone are any price mechanisms by which individuals operating within society can place accurate valuation or create profitable plans. The largesse goes to the least imaginative and capable: bureaucrats and those speculators connected to them.
End the German state’s ownership of the Church.
End Germany’s membership in NATO and the EU.
End open immigration.
End centralization of Germany.
End the German national state.
Let the German imagination run wild again.
In short, be bad, meine Brüder!
