When a place you’ve been visiting for years, a veritable haven, is attacked with deadly force by a maniac who’s still on the loose, it becomes personal. You want to keep cool, judge it with a level head and from a distance, keeping the v-word at bay, and you might just pull it off, but the fact remains: it’s personal.
Staying with the level-headedness for a moment, always spherically minded and critical to the bone, and not mincing words because there’s no place for minced words in this day and age, the issues are two, and grave, and they have to do with last year’s immigration policy and its reflexive, ill-conceived nature.
There’s a difference between compassion and political expedience in the name of compassion. Humanitarianism is one thing — helping people in their time of need, being charitable and large, kind and caring, these are noble acts, and all credit to those of us who apply them not when it’s convenient but when it truly matters — but, and here’s the big nasty but, political expedience is something altogether different. Reacting with reflexive mania to a crisis, losing all sense of proportion and control in the name of a humanitarianism grossly misapplied, is neither charitable nor reasonable.
It’s idiotic and convenient. (These are my level-headed words.)
Sadly this is exactly what happened last year in Germany when the Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and her administration decided to pursue their faulty politics of pseudo-moralism, opening the gates of the country willy-nilly to a vast number of people against all sense of manageability, demanding that other countries do the same without applying the proper checks and procedures, without the infrastructure in place to monitor and handle the ultra-abrupt inflow of so many people over such a short period of time.
See below for Part 2
Part 2
In 2015, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and her administration decided to open the gates of the country willy-nilly to a vast number of people against all sense of manageability, without the infrastructure in place to monitor and handle the process.
The policy backfired. The influx in question was so sudden and overwhelming, so ill-managed and badly conceived, it was equivalent to an overdose. The lands accepting the visitors were unable to cope. The visitors were clueless as to the local customs, the whole situation propped up on a fuzzy idea with no platform or backbone, no way to execute it successfully.
There were protests, disputes, causes for concern, a call to sit down and think things through (plus a wave of racist crap that usually accompanies issues concerning immigrants, but screw the racists, they’re morons!) and yet none of the claims to reason were heeded. The calls for patience and caution were conflated with racism and bigotry, all criticisms rejected, the policy being pushed through. The goodness of the soul was invoked by the self-proclaimed champions of charity, and the gates were opened to the sounds of the mantra of the saints among us — as if we, the objectors, were monsters — the saints pointing to us, dismissing us and our arguments, rejecting all criticism, telling everyone, ‘What if it were us out there? Open the gates, now, and we’ll figure out how to handle the situation as we go along.’
It was a bunch of nonsense! Utter Scheise! The cries of the sentimentally-driven and expedient had prevailed, setting the stage for monumental blowback. The high-handed among us, the emotional junkies in our midst, if not the criminally negligent and bigger-picture-challenged, had gotten their way at the expense of stability down the line.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how things would go wrong. A blanket approach to a complicated problem could only present complications down the line, the most prominent of which was the way the people of Germany would react should things go wrong — and how couldn’t they go wrong? When you allow an enormous amount of people in any setting without preparation or monitoring, you’re a fool not to expect friction.
And here we are. The gates were opened willy-nilly, all in the name of ‘goodness,’ without the authorities being able to properly screen and record the people coming in, let alone prepare them for the culture that was about to host them, and when the shit hit the fan, public opinion went against all asylum seekers.
Watch this space for Parts 3 and 4
PS – If you’re offended by the direction this piece is taking, have a cold shower.