THE PROFOUND DISAPPOINTMENT OF ANGELA MERKEL
John Chuckman
Anyone who says she admires Hillary Clinton, as Angela
Merkel has said, plainly invites revulsion if not contempt. The lack of
judgment broadcast by such words strikes the mind like a grating noise. Clinton's
record of behavior literally stinks to high heaven, much as a pile of corpses
left to rot in the hot sun, and, as it happens, there are a great many rotting
corpses in Clinton’s history.
What an immense disappointment Merkel is. Intelligent and
well educated with an appealing, fairly benign face, but, wait, am I describing
Merkel or, in fact, Obama? It turns out not to matter. They are a pair of
malignant soul mates born thousands of miles apart who conspired later in life
to bring the world a great deal of unhappiness.
Merkel has been de facto leader of Europe during an
extremely challenging period, one demanding real statesmanship. Instead, she
has provided attitudes and short-term fixes married to complete acceptance of the
most destructive American policies possible. Her policies have alienated large
numbers of her own people and, almost more importantly, contributed mightily to
the weakening of loyalties in Europe – not a record of which to be proud.
Unfortunately, during the period of her Chancellorship, there
have been no other European leaders of stature and ability to balance or oppose
her. Absolutely none. Britain had the flabby joke of David Cameron who
collapsed his own house of cards through sheer political incompetence. France
had the absurd Francois Hollande, an impossibly pompous man with not a single
achievement to his credit, a parody of a French President, certainly the worst
leader in modern French history.
So, Europe at a time when America put great new stresses and
demands upon it for its own selfish reasons had no leadership worth mentioning.
All the major figures were content with accommodating America’s harsh and
destructive initiatives. Well, I do think there is something to be said for the
dictum that history is biography.
Everyone involved has suffered for Merkel’s attitudes and
whims. Europe simply could not have done much worse. The press so glibly speaks
of the rise of the political Right in Europe and in America, but what we really
see on both continents is public reaction to years of blundering policies
causing vast misery in many places.
You cannot support America’s destruction of the Middle East
without accepting its direct consequences both in massive migrations of
terrified people and in the rise of terror by relatively powerless young men
wanting revenge for what has been done to them, their families and homes. Yet
this is precisely what Angela Merkel has tried to do, trying to avoid
inevitable, destructive consequences of stupid acts she has supported. Having
never raised her voice against what America was doing, Merkel decided to deal
with some of the consequences by playing the grandmotherly figure who welcomes
an avalanche of refugees, seemingly not appreciating for a second what that
means on the streets of her own country.
No decent person is against organized, peaceful immigration
or against giving assistance to desperate refugees. There is an ethical obligation
for both as well as some sound economic reasons. But if a truck, set to deliver
two hundred gallons of fuel oil to your home’s heating system, pumps instead
two thousand gallons, you suddenly have a disturbing, costly, and dangerous
situation. The analogy is actually quite inadequate for what has happened in
some places with armies of terrified people fleeing America’s imposed-horrors.
Merkel, realizing what her support of America’s destruction
in Libya, Syria, and other places has wrought, tried setting the example of a
benign figure ready to help everyone, a kind of bonhomie approach to what was a
totally-avoidable catastrophe. The impossibility of this should have been seen,
but it was not. Too many extremely-different refugees – different in language,
customs, religion, wealth, and politics - cannot be absorbed quickly or
peacefully by any country, and perhaps that is even more true of relatively old
and homogeneous societies such as Germany.
We like to speak of xenophobia with contempt, but in the
gritty real lives of vast populations everywhere on the planet, it is a reality
just as much as backward religious practices, which cannot be wished away. True
xenophobia, indeed, much resembles fundamentalist religion in that it is an
expression of superstitious instincts, deeply-rooted instincts whose origins go
beyond mere learned behaviors. Just try asking highly religious people to set
aside their feelings for completely different newcomers, the example coming to
mind of the Ultra-Orthodox in Israel and their “take” on others. It is possible
only in the imagination.
But xenophobia is only part of the mix, despite the claims
of a superficial mainstream press, and I am not just speaking of it. We promote
nationalism and national unity in every Western country with flags, anthems,
pledges, holiday customs, uniforms, speeches, parades, even laws, and then some
leaders seem to expect their people, almost on command, to turn their backs on
all the lifelong indoctrination and embrace sudden, great change? It simply cannot
be done.
As with anything else you may care to discuss, the time to
act is before a great problem or crisis has been created. Preventative health
care is no less valuable for nations than it is for individuals. The leaders of
Europe should have seen what America’s fanatical crusade was going to do and
opposed it, forcefully, before it was started. In doing so, Europe would have
been strengthened instead of diminished as it has been., to say nothing of
preventing the death and maiming of millions in the Middle East. Instead they
quietly supported it and even donated resources to the insane efforts of
America’s Grande Armée in the Middle East.
Merkel’s contribution to disaster goes further, to her
relations with one of the planet’s genuine madman-leaders, Netanyahu. She has
been selling him sophisticated submarines at knock-down prices for years. Only
recently they agreed to three more of them in a deal which has Netanyahu being
examined in Israel for criminal activity. I think it fair to ask, too, why a
sardine-sized country needs a fleet of sophisticated submarines, some or all of
which are widely rumored to be outfitted with nuclear-armed cruise missiles?
Does that make sense to anyone other than Merkel, Netanyahu, Clinton, and Obama?
Does that contribute to stability in the
Middle East? And why doesn’t the excruciating injustice of Israel’s occupation and
regular theft of land enter into considerations?
Germany’s taking a million refugees is roughly equivalent to
America’s taking four million. It does not take a great imagination to see what
the results of such a massive, short-term influx would be. Moreover, never mind
Donald Trump, there has been no American government, ever, willing to accept
such numbers at one time. Indeed, had America’s recent governments demonstrated
the slightest sense of responsibility for what they had caused, they would have
taken extraordinary steps for the refugees, but they did not. Instead, they
encouraged measures like Merkel’s response, which, in terms of total numbers
involved in the human catastrophe, is necessarily pathetic.
But, if you read enough history, you will know it has always
been part of the American government’s character to do what as it pleases in
the world with little or no regard for the consequences, so long as those
consequences are on foreign shores. It is an attitude bred in a people who too
often feel they can have it all and have it now and a people who have the
illusion, generated both in commercial advertising and in fundamentalist Christianity,
of endless youth with all its happy irresponsibility. It is something which
actually marks America as especially unsuitable for enlightened world leadership,
while it is the very quality demonic figures such as Kissinger or Brzezinski regarded
as useful to their twisted international purposes.
Merkel quickly learned what she had done was a terrible
political mistake. Consequences were quick, so she backtracked, never a
dignified behavior for a national leader. But more than that, Merkel, realizing
what the consequences might be of a few million more refugees temporarily
encamped in Turkey continuing on into Europe, was quick to strike a deal with
another of our planet’s most unscrupulous and dangerous leaders, the madman who
rules Turkey, Erdogan. She agreed to pay him several billion Euros to keep the
refugees in their massive Turkish camps.
This was not just a highly unethical deal, it should have
been seen for the ongoing danger it represented, especially in view of Europe’s
general relations with Erdogan and its confused efforts to deal with his many
demands, ranging from visa-free travel in Europe for Turks to full membership in
the EU. Again, American policy had created a huge problem by treating Turkey,
an undemocratic country with limited respect for human rights and one for some
years ruled by a madman, as an indispensable ally against Russia, so the EU to
this day feels it must accommodate that ugly reality in all its policies.
Obviously, a country in the state we see in Turkey –
constant war and terror against the Kurds, serious government suppression of
free speech and activities, assassinations, widespread Muslim fundamentalism, and
now new waves of repression following a failed coup – is in no shape to qualify
for EU membership under the EU’s own requirements, which at least struggle to
be faithful to Enlightenment principles.
Erdogan, never one to be shy about what he wants, has
already threatened publicly to “open the gates” if the EU does not proceed in
treating his demands appropriately. So, Merkel’s dirty deal with the devil is
seriously threatened and becomes just one more source of uncertainty and
instability. It is not a promising situation.
I believe Merkel was permanently scarred by growing up in
East Germany and likely harbors both inordinate fear of Russia and slavish
admiration for America, neither attitude being warranted in the least today.
Her mental landscape possibly includes images of Andropov versus Jimmy Stewart,
but policy built on fantasy and fears is bad policy, always.
The Bush-Obama years have been, in so far as foreign policy
goes, about as stupidly and blunderingly destructive as Lyndon Johnson’s bull-headed
insistence on fighting a major war in Vietnam. Johnson ended by killing about 3
million people, generating instability and misery, dividing America itself, and
achieving nothing worth achieving. Bush-Obama have killed at least a couple of
million, generated instability and misery, divided the countries of Europe, also
achieving nothing worth achieving. There is not one part of the vast sphere
America has arrogantly viewed as its area of influence that has not been made
worse by Bush-Obama policies.
Mass killing, mass destruction of old societies and cities, induced-coups,
threats, fears, torture, the creation of huge and desperate human movements,
promotion and reward of terror as a covert policy tool, the decline everywhere
in the rule of law, extra-judicial killing on an organized scale, a huge
erosion in respect for international institutions like the now much-debased UN,
an endless and confusing patchwork of lies told about terrible events - all
while ignoring genuinely terrible situations like those in Palestine or in
Saudi Arabia or in Turkey.
Apart from the horrors Merkel has implicitly or explicitly
embraced and apart from the anger and disruptions and economic hardship her
embrace has meant for Europe – America’s arbitrary and unwarranted sanctions against
Russia have cost the German and French economies literally billions which
America smilingly allows them to pay - one
look at a map of Europe tells you just part of the reason why her views are so utterly
counter-productive.
For scores of reasons, the future of Europe is in a
cooperative and close relationship with Russia. It just cannot be otherwise,
although, if you are determined to waste enough resources, impoverishing to
some degree your own people through decreased trade and increased military
waste, you can hold the inevitable off for quite a while. Look at America’s ten
years of sheer insanity in Vietnam if you doubt for a moment that it is
possible for a great country to do absolutely pointless and insanely costly
things. Well, another insane and costly crusade is exactly the course America
has been on in recent years, and leaders like Merkel have served as the most
willing helpers in the task.
Obama and his political associate, Hillary Clinton, are total
failures as figures of principle and as leaders, and Merkel very much resembles
them, even down to the pathetic recent appeal she is using with German voters
in anticipation of 2017 elections. She has imported wholesale Hillary’s
squalid, 1950s-style claim that Russia threatens the integrity of elections,
her empty claims being just an effort to stoke-up fears to get what she wants.
And then there are the remarkably empty and pretentious words
she wrote in her official letter to President-elect Trump:
"Germany and
America are united by shared values: through democracy, freedom, respect for
the right and dignity of every individual, irrespective of origin, color,
religion, sex, sexual orientation or political attitude. On the basis of these
values, I would like to offer you a close cooperation between the governments
of our countries."
No clear-thinking person can accept such words as anything
but hypocritical establishment claptrap - the kind of phony stuff just rejected
by the American people. There is not a sincere phrase contained in the
paragraph, just an arrogant assumption of moral loftiness and a presumption of setting
standards for future relations. Can any thoughtful reader not sense almost an
insult in the words? Insufferable stuff coming, as it does, from someone who
never lifted a finger, except to assist, in the killing of tens of thousands of
women and their families in half a dozen lands.
Trump will not do everything right, I know, but Merkel has
done almost nothing right, much as her admired friends, Hillary Clinton and Barack
Obama.
