Six weeks ago, the German people were carrying placards, handbags and a smug sense of superiority around with them about how they welcomed migrants – the more the merrier – to Germany, and what utter racist bastards the Hungarians were for shutting them out. Which was fine, except the default sanctimony position they adopted didn’t take into account the fact that Germany has eight times the indigenous population of Hungary.
In those six weeks, the Herrenvolk have gone from “Alles Klar!” to “Achtung!” …..with the result that today, they’re rushing to arm themselves. All across this country with very strict gun-control laws, demand is booming as they seek out self-defense weapons – pepper sprays, gas pistols, flare guns, electroshock weapons and animal repellents – and frantically apply for weapons permits at hitherto unknown levels.
Here in France following the Paris attestats, the ‘Je suis Charlie’ spirit has been rejuvenated: intermingled with the Christmas decorations this year are a surfeit of tricoleur flags (sales of which have trebled) and in my agrarian part of the world, the farmers have put up posters vowing ‘Solidarity with Parisians’. Sorry, but you have to laugh: the locals here detest Parisians.
Meanwhile, laws are being passed with greater and greater acceleration, not surprising given the 5-Star fuel being fed to the media about France being at war: next year there will be more cameras and fewer freedoms. So far there is little or no sign of the MSM asking awkward questions: rather, it is all ‘France walks tall’, ‘France will endure’, let’s keep on bombing and yes, by all means let’s have a Euroarmy – why not? We are all in this together after all.
What nobody of any influence anywhere in the EU does is to simply observe a blindingly obvious trend: that the more the perniciously incompetent EC/EU/ECB Troika gets involved in a Member State’s affairs, the more extreme the politics become. Be it Portugal, Spain, Italy or Greece, the right, left and centre consensus has largely evaporated in favour of more hard-edged ideologies – with which the EC (naturally) takes issue, because they don’t toe the line.
In France, Germany and the UK, the commentator looks in vain for anyone suggesting that the arrival of a Standing Army with no need for permission to enter an EU State into this mix is anything other than a coincidence – happy or otherwise. The huge exception to the rule, unsurprisingly, is Greece: there, the People have learned the hard way.
It seems to me that what we have generally in the West now (but more markedly in Europe) is the media turning into crowds, and the electorate’s crowds turning into mobs. The phrase ‘wisdom of crowds’ was of course always meant to be ironic, but that irony has never been more apparent. When influential crowds start telling mobs what to think, you will get paedomania, BBC witch-hunts, the international Syrian Bombing Contest, contradictory nonsense about Parisian terrorists, love affairs turning into hate in Germany, everyone talking rubbish about Greek ‘debt responsibility’, an unhealthy obsession with fame, Congress voting to shut out genuine Syrian refugees and, as the heat is turned up, hysteria.
It’s a highly unstable and acidic formula at the best of times. But we are not heading into the best of times, and we are not evolving as a species. In the medium term, bland apathy will turn into blind panic…and a massive bout of blamestorming will begin.
The Slog 