(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Ochenta años después)
Last Thursday marked 80 years since the military defeat of German National Socialism and the end of the Second World War in Europe. One of the most monstrous pages in the history of humanity was thus closed. Generated, let us remember, by monstrous European ideas and with European criminal actors, always in the Europe of the Enlightenment. In the European Parliament in Strasbourg a debate was held on this occasion which demonstrated once again not only that memory fades with time, but that today’s politics is in fact already deaf to the echoes of history.
On 8 May 1945 a war of colossal overlapping tragedies came to an end in Europe. And the origin of this collapse of humanity lay in Germany. It was the nation that considered itself the people of poets and thinkers, the vanguard of development, of culture and of civilisation, that was the initial cause of this war of aggression and of the immense and terrifying exceptionality of the industrialised genocide that was the Holocaust. It was a qualitatively unique operation because it poured the priority interest and effort of a modern State into the extermination of another people, the Jews.
A priority that many times eclipsed the war effort itself of a Germany already surrounded by enemies and with a war that was turning against it precisely when the “final solution” was being organised.
The criminal frenzy of National Socialism arises from the arrogance of a totalitarian idealism that places human utopia above respect for the sacredness of human life, until it falls into the black hole of total crime.
They intended to achieve an ideal world free of imperfections and weaknesses. “Am Deutsche Wesen soll die Welt genesen”, the German essence shall heal the world, is a motto that still resonates and is not National Socialist but the product of Romanticism and of the unstoppable advance of emotions and feelings over rationality in the political and cultural life of the Germans. Very few in Strasbourg recalled the supremacist origins of this war in which, in the end, one criminal ideology would fight another very similar one that had the decisive advantage of counting the defender of freedom as an improbable ally.
Of the perception of superiority always latent in the largest people of Europe we had a contemporary replica, tragic for the Germans and for the entire continent, many years later. It was when Angela Merkel threw all prudence and responsibility overboard and announced an opening of borders that became a call to all those fleeing their countries, for whatever reason, to seek refuge in Germany, the heart of Europe.
Merkel issued the call from Germany, but one can only get there by crossing many other European countries that neither wanted open borders nor were moved by the wave of sentimentality promoted by Merkel, her Government and the German media, by then all of them in lockstep. Thus was caused a colossal immigration wave that has been the worst blow dealt to the cohesion, the security and the well-being of the Germans in exactly 80 years.
“Wir schaffen es!”, said Merkel in that cry of hubris, “We are going to manage it!”. That delirious display of arrogance, with its proclamation that Germany would take in anyone who wished to come, was not far from the chants of the 1930s in which it was promised that the German conquest of the world would make happy all those who deserved it.
Nor is it very far from the infinite arrogance of the Green movement, which has been the promoter and which has led all the traditional German parties into a policy of irrational radical environmentalism and into a climate hysteria that has led all of Europe into an energy, industrial, agricultural and cultural policy turned against the real interests of the European peoples.
The damage of that messianic message, so arrogant, sentimental and romantic, has been infinite. But it is already as internalised in German society as other obsessions were at other moments, and it ended up imposing the concept of “climate neutrality”, which in a delirious act by the new Government led by Friedrich Merz has been included in a reform of the German Basic Law.
A reform carried out, by the way, in a crooked and dishonest operation that resorted to an already nonexistent majority of a Bundestag already disavowed by the February elections, because the new balance of forces in the new Bundestag made this reform impossible. In any case, Germany’s suicidal policy, whose effects it is already suffering severely, was transferred, with the full complicity of Emmanuel Macron’s inane globalism in Paris, to the whole European Union, especially in the last six delirious years of the German Ursula von der Leyen as president of the European Commission. As was easy to anticipate in a rational analysis, and as the conservative forces, still a minority in the European Parliament, had already warned, this policy symbolised by the Green Deal has turned out to be destructive and suicidal in the race to compete with other regions of the world that have sober development projects. The European Union is ever poorer and the citizens of its countries less free. And the advantage in development and growth of the United States and even China increases without cease.
All of this is a gift of German Romanticism, as is even Marxism and of course National Socialism: the incorrigible vocation of the Germans to want to correct, occupy, save or educate the rest of their neighbours and of the world. In the rest of the world they have paid no attention whatsoever to this new wave of redemptive ecologist ideology. But in Europe they have imposed it with devastating effects.
Returning to the colossally lethal effects of the previous German experiment, it must be recalled that the war which ended 80 years ago killed 60 million. Nazism, which planned a Third Reich of a thousand years, lasted 12 years. Nazism, as an ominous criminal ideology, ceased to exist as a political project.
But communism remained, the other redemptive ideology invented by Germans in pursuit of the ideal world, which generates only the most monstrous hells. Communism murdered a hundred million in little more than a century, it remains alive and present today in many parliaments and it governs, for example, in Cuba, in Venezuela and also in Spain. Because many do not want to remember that on 8 May one part of Europe was liberated, the part that had the good fortune of being liberated from Normandy and from Africa by North American forces and their allies. The other part of Europe merely exchanged one murderous tyranny for another, and this second one far longer-lived. Because it did not even die after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the liberation of the Central European, Baltic and Balkan countries that had suffered 40 years of the terror of Soviet socialism.
Communism and its totalitarian project transformed itself, through many diverse mutations, into vegan, carnivorous and cannibal socialism, according to the damage and the violence and coercion applied to achieve its ends. In the developed world it applied the counsel of Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, which had placed all the serpent’s eggs in the universities of the North American elites in the 1930s and 1940s and afterwards again in Europe. And thus it went on conquering every field of human activity, from the university to primary education, information, the media, communication, culture, the Church and then the parties, no longer only those of the left but also those which were the conservative and Christian Democratic parties of the so-called centre-right. All of them today form, together with the economic, financial, legal and cultural ruling classes that emerged from all those universities and whose personal interests have adapted to the pressure of permanent ideological coercion, a broad front in which the majority would be offended if called communist, but which has ends that are those of socialism and of the end of individual liberty and of the Western civilisation of democracies and plurality. Call it social democracy if you wish, but the exceptional thing is that once again, starting from Germany, they managed to spread and conquer practically the entire political spectrum of the Western countries. Today the CDU is far to the left of the SPD of the 1960s after its Bad Godesberg congress.
The authentic plurality represented by the existence of options different from the social democratic parties is now fought without scruple by the European Union, using public money to destroy all those who oppose its anti-national project. By means of social engineering, of collectivist egalitarianism, of the destruction of the reference values of Western civilisation and of massive ideological coercion in Europe, they are using the path of vegan socialism to take us to the same place towards which the carnivorous socialism of more brutal forms of regime, or the outright cannibal socialism of Cuba, Venezuela, increasingly Spain, but above all China, are heading. Because China is in reality the object of their envy. The way the regime of the Chinese Communist Party treats its citizens is what the great transformers of the Davos Forum, from Bill Gates to Klaus Schwab, have so applauded.
To confront this colossal liberticidal offensive, we, the defenders of freedom and truth, have resources. It is fundamental to know that the alternative is, sooner or later, hell, whether socialist or Islamist. And that it is necessary to be afraid of what may await our children in order to lose the fear of the consequences of acting now. One spur to that is the tribute, 80 years on, to so many millions of victims of the totalitarian redemptive ideologies of the 20th century, criminal projects which must always be fought, however seductive their forms may appear. Because all of them have the same end: to eradicate in the individual the yearning for freedom and truth that the human being who knows he has a soul will always possess.
Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.
