For centuries in Europe the Christian idea that everyone should love everyone else, forgive any and all offense, was honored more in the breach than the observance. The doctrine of pity, mercy, humility and self-denial was taught by the Catholic and Protestant churches, while they oppressed, imprisoned, tortured, and burnt to death countless men, women and children. For a thousand years and more Europe practiced blatant, official, Christian hypocrisy.

Now, according to recent (April 2017) research by The Telegraph, fourteen of the 23 least religious countries in the world are European. Poland “stands out against the rest of Europe, with 86 per cent answering ‘yes’ to the question “do you feel religious?” Only “around three in 10 Britons feel religious” (while “56 per cent of Americans” do).

But now, when Europe no longer preaches the doctrine, it is at last officially practicing it.

Almost the entire continent is martyring itself.

Giulio Meotti writes at Gatestone:

September 2015. Thousands of Syrian migrants crossing the Balkan route were heading toward Germany. Chancellor Angela Merkel was on the phone with Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière, talking about a number of measures to protect the borders, where thousands of policemen were secretly located along with buses and helicopters. De Maizière turned for advice to Dieter Romann, then head of the police. “Can we live with the images that will come out?” de Mazière asked. “What happens if 500 refugees with children in their arms run toward the border guards?”

De Maiziére was told that the appropriate use of the measures to be taken would have be decided by the police on the field. When de Maizière relayed Romann’s response to the Chancellor, Merkel reversed her original commitment. And the borders were opened for 180 days.

“For historical reasons, the Chancellor feared images of armed German police confronting civilians on our borders,” writes Robin Alexander, Die Welt’s leading journalist, who revealed these details in a new book, Die Getriebenen (“The Driven Ones”). Alexander reveals the real reason that pushed Merkel to open the door to a million and a half migrants in a few weeks: “In the end, Merkel refused to take responsibility, governing through the polls.” This is how the famous Merkel’s motto “Wir schaffen das” was born: “We can do it.”

According to Die Zeit:

Merkel and her people are convinced that the marchers could only be stopped with the help of violence: with water cannons, truncheons and pepper spray. It would be chaotic and the images would be horrific. Merkel is extremely wary of such images and of their political impact, and she is convinced that Germany wouldn’t tolerate them. Merkel once said that Germany wouldn’t be able to stand the images from the dismal conditions in the refugee camp at Calais for more than three days. But how much more devastating would images be of refugees being beaten as they try to get to Austria or Germany?

Merkel’s refugee policy was not a masterpiece of humanitarian politics; it was dictated by the fear of television images spread all over the world. In so many key moments, it is the photograph that dictates our behavior: the image that dishonors us, that makes us cringe in horror.

Now, the main German sentiment that seems to be driving public opinion and politics is a dramatic sense of guilt. It is a “secular sin”, according to a new book by German sociologist Rolf Peter Sieferle that is topping the German bestseller list, “Finis Germania“.

The behavior of Germans during the current migrant crisis, however, is symbolic of a more general Western condition. On April 30, 1975, the fall of Saigon was part of a war fought and lost by the United States as much on television as in the Vietnamese forests and rice paddies. It ended with the the escape of helicopters from the rooftop of the US embassy.

In 1991, the imagery of the “highway of death” of Saddam Hussein’s bombed army of thugs fleeing a plundered Kuwait also shocked the public in the West, and led to calls for an immediate cessation of the fighting in Iraq and Kuwait. The result was that Saddam Hussein’s air force and Republican Guard divisions were spared; during the “peace” that followed, it was these troops who butchered Kurds and Shiites.

The photograph of a dead American soldier dragged through the streets of Mogadishu after the “Black Hawk Down” incident pushed President Bill Clinton to order a shameful retreat from Somalia. That photograph also led the US Administration to rethink and cancel plans to use US troops for United Nations peace operations in Bosnia, Haiti and other strategic points. General David Petraeus would describe America’s engagement in Afghanistan as a “war of perception”.

Even the suffering of our enemies disturbs us, in the humanitarian culture of the West. We are therefore increasingly amenable to policies of appeasement, censorship and retreat, in order not to have to face the possibility of such horribleness and actually having to fight it.

That is why radical Islam has been able to horrify the West into submission. We have paralysed ourselves. We censor the cartoons, the graphic photos of the terrorists’ victims and even the faces and names of the jihadists. The Islamic terrorists, on the other hand, are not publicity-seekers; they are soldiers ready to die and kill in the name of what they care about.

This week, the German media was shocked by the revelation that the German air force will probably come under fire during its Syrian mission. “Endangering German soldiers!” — with an exclamation point – wrote Bild, the largest-selling newspaper in Germany. The statement exposed the anxiety of what John Vinocur of the Wall Street Journal called a “country where the army and air force basically do not fight”. A pacifist Germany is now a source of trouble also for its own neighbors, such as Poland. “For centuries, our main worry in Poland was a very strong German army”, said former Polish Defense Minister Janusz Onyszkiewicz. “Today, we’re seriously worried about German armed forces that are too weak.”

The Western establishment censors images of our enemies’ crimes while giving prominence to our “guilt”. The French government censored the “gruesome torture” of the victims at the Bataclan Theater, who were castrated, disemboweled and had their eyes gouged out by the Islamist terrorists. It was a mistake: it was in the public interest to know exactly what enemy we are facing.

The FBI and Department of Justice released a transcript of the Orlando jihadist’s 911 call, but omitted all reference to the terror group ISIS and to Islam. These authorities did not want the public to know that Omar Mateen identified himself as an “Islamic soldier”.

The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance then told the British press it should not report when terrorists are Muslim.

The CEO of Twitter, Dick Costolo, suspended accounts that showed photographs of the beheading of John Foley, along with other Islamist beheadings and savagery. But Twitter did not mind being flooded by images of a little dead boy, Alan (Aylan) Kurdi on a beach.

The mainstream media in the US fought hard to lift the photo ban on military coffins during the war in Iraq. Its goal, apparently, was to humiliate and intimidate the public, to lower the support for the war.

Images, as in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, are published only if they amplify the West’s sense of guilt and turn the “war on terror” into something even more dangerous than the jihad causing the war.

Amnesty International’s Secretary General, Irene Khan – referring to concentration camps in the Soviet Union, where millions of people perished – infamously called Guantanamo “the Gulag of our time”. The result is to erase our enemy from our imagination. This is how the “war on terror” has become synonymous with lawlessness throughout the West.

Ten years ago, after the brave surge in Iraq, US soldiers discovered Al Qaeda’s torture chambers. No one – not ABC, not CBS, not the New York Times – published one photo of them; they just filled our eyes with naked bodies at Abu Ghraib.

We are utopian technophiles and, contrary to the traditional Western view that we are flawed human beings in a tragic world. We now believe in Mark Zuckerberg’s brave new world where no one should ever suffer and everyone should be happy and peaceful all the time. That is an exorbitant dream. For a short time we can afford it, as with Angela Merkel and Europe’s migrant crisis. Unfortunately, that fantasy will not last. The conflicts at our gates, together with our aversion to making hard choices, will exact a far higher price.

Let’s start with a quotation from the New York Times – not an organ we often go to for support of our arguments:

SUMTE, Germany — This bucolic, one-street settlement of handsome redbrick farmhouses may for the moment have many more cows than people, but next week it will become one of the fastest growing places in Europe. Not that anyone in Sumte is very excited about it. In early October, the district government informed Sumte’s mayor, Christian Fabel, by email that his village of 102 people just over the border in what was once Communist East Germany would take in 1,000 asylum seekers.

His wife, the mayor said, assured him it must be a hoax. “It certainly can’t be true” that such a small, isolated place would be asked to accommodate nearly 10 times as many migrants as it had residents, she told him. “She thought it was a joke,” he said.

But it was not. Sumte has become a showcase of the extreme pressures bearing down on Germany …

What is happening in Sumte is just one small instance of what is happening all over Germany.

Muslim immigration into the European states had been going on for decades, sending crime rates up, and draining national treasuries as welfare support was lavishly granted to the newcomers. The Muslims were not expected to become Europeans. They were not required to learn the language of the people they settled among. They could have their own law courts and enforce their own laws, which were not only different from those of the host countries, but entirely incompatible with them. They formed states within the states. And it was the native populations who were expected to adapt to the values and customs of the foreigners.

This strange development in European history was called “multiculturalism”.

At last, in October 2010,  one European leader – the one whose voice carried most weight in the European Union –  the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, dared to say that it was not good for her country. Addressing an audience of her own party, the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), she declared that the multiculturalist project had “utterly failed”.  “The concept,” she said, “that we are now living side by side and are happy about it does not work.” Immigrants should integrate and adopt Germany’s culture and values.

That statement should have resounded through the continent. It should have launched a change of policy throughout the EU. The mass immigration of Muslims should have stopped.

But none of those things happened.

And a few years later, in 2015, Angela Merkel changed her mind, reversed her judgment.

It is largely due to Chancellor Angela Merkel that a huge tidal wave of Muslims is now flooding over Europe.

The immigrants are now called “refugees”, and though they come from many miserable Islamic countries in Asia and Africa, the pretense is that they are victims of the warring factions in Syria.

Again just one leader of a European nation can clearly see the Muslim invasion for what it is, as he tries to keep it out of his country. This time it is the Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, who dares to speak out in defense of European civilization.

We quote from Gatestone, where Soeren Kern writes:

Speaking at an October 22 [2015]  gathering of the European People’s Party in Madrid, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán warned of the consequences of Merkel’s immigration policies. He said:

We are in deep trouble. The migration crisis has the potential to destabilize governments, countries and the whole European continent. … What we have been facing is not a refugee crisis. This is a migratory movement composed of economic migrants, refugees and also foreign fighters. …

I also want to underline that there is an unlimited source of supply of people, after Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Africa is now also on the move. The dimension and the volume of the danger is well above our expectations. …

Neither the German, Austrian nor the Hungarian way of life is a basic right of all people on the Earth. It is only a right of those ones who have contributed to it. Europe is not able to accept everyone who wants a better life. ….

We cannot avoid speaking about the quality of our democracies.

Democracies, he reminds them, in which freedom of speech has long been an essential value; and a value the media have exploited and betrayed by trying to hide the truth about the invasion rather than revealing it to the public.

Is it freedom of information and speech when the media usually show women and children [as “refugees”], while 70% of the migrants are young men and they look like an army? How could it happen that our people feel that their opinion is not being taken into consideration? And we have to address the question of whether our people want what has been happening. Did we get authorization from them to allow millions of migrants to enter our continent? … No, distinguished delegates, we did not.

He puts the blame squarely on “the European left” – though Merkel’s government is a conservative coalition, and other conservative governments have acquiesced in the policy of admitting unlimited numbers of the “refugees”:

We cannot hide the fact that the European left has a clear agenda. They are supportive of migration. They actually import future leftist voters to Europe hiding behind [the excuse of] humanism. It is an old trick but I do not understand why we have to accept it. They consider registration and protection of borders as bureaucratic, nationalist and against human rights. They have a dream about the politically constructed world societywithout religious traditions, without borders, without nations. They attack core values of our European identity: family, nation, subsidiarity and responsibility.”

To all of which Chancellor Angela Merkel remains purposefully deaf.

Most of the invaders want to go to Germany. And Merkel wants them to be warmly welcomed there.

According to the president of the Bavarian Association of Municipalities, Uwe Brandl, Germany is now on track to have “20 million Muslims by 2020”. The surge in Germany’s Muslim population represents a demographic shift of epic proportions, one that will change the face of Germany forever, “but we are just standing by, watching it happen”. 

Addressing an expo in Nuremburg on October 14, Brandl warned that untrammeled migration will entail heavy costs for German taxpayers and may also lead to social unrest. He said:

A four-member refugee family receives up to 1,200 euros per month in transfer payments. Plus accommodation and meals. Now go to an unemployed German family man who has worked maybe 30 years, and now with his family receives only marginally more. These people are asking us whether we politicians really see this as fair and just.

Brandl said this also applies to the electronic health card, which provides asylum seekers with the same benefits as Germans who have paid into the health insurance system for many years. To criticize this as unfair has “nothing to do with racism or right-wing extremism”.

“Racism” and “right-wing extremism” are what any protestor against the invasion is accused of, as we’ll demonstrate below.

Brandl’s concerns are echoed in a leaked intelligence document, which warns that the influx of more than one million migrants from the Muslim world this year will lead to increasing political instability in Germany.

The document – portions of which were published by Die Welt on October 25 – reveals growing alarm within the highest echelons of Germany’s intelligence and security apparatus about the consequences of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door immigration policy.

The so-called non-paper (the author of the document remains anonymous) warns that the “integration of hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants will be impossible given the large numbers involved and the already-existing Muslim parallel societies in Germany”. The document adds:

We are importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other peoples, as well as a different understanding of society and law. German security agencies are unable to deal with these imported security problems, and the resulting reactions from the German population.

An unidentified high-ranking security official told Die Welt:

The high influx of people from other parts of the world will lead to the instability of our country. By allowing this mass migration, we are producing extremists. Mainstream society is radicalizing because the majority does not want migration, which is being forced by the political elites. In the future, many Germans will turn away from the constitutional state.

But to all this Merkel still remains deaf.

And most of the German media try to keep all such warnings from the public.

Why? Why is Merkel doing this? What changed her mind? Why is she – a conservative – being helped to destroy Germany by the left-leaning media?

It is from Spiegel Online that we get an answer, and a very telling answer it is.

The article begins:

Even as an image of a Germany taking great pains to welcome hundreds of thousands of refugees has bolstered the country’s image abroad … [Our emphasis]

So the important news magazine Spiegel (once the German eqivalent of Time magazine, deliberately designed to resemble it, and now still flourishing when its model has long since grown specter-thin and almost died), assumes, and delights in its assumption, that by letting in the Muslim hordes it is bolstering Germany’s image abroad.

The Spiegel article is chiefly concerned with accusing any individual or group  expressing opposition to Merkel’s policy, of being guilty of  “racism”, “xenophobia”,  and “right-wing extremism”, even finding shreds of evidence (for instance among comments on certain blogs) that such opposition is an incipient revival of Nazism.

As more and more Germans express their fear, disgust, anger, whether emotionally or rationally, the Spiegel can only see them as in the grip of pitiless, inhumane, even cruel impulses, which might negate the claim Germany now feels entitled to make on the world’s admiration of it as a compassionate nation.

This reaction to the Islamic invasion – not the invasion itself – is what the Spiegel sees as the problem:

… it has also been accompanied by a wave of hatred that cannot be played down.

At the center of this second, disturbing narrative is Patriots against the Islamization of the West, or Pegida, a xenophobic grassroots movement that has manifested itself with demonstrations each Monday mostly in Dresden in the east, but also in other parts of Germany. But Pegida is only one part of a much larger problem …

Germany these days, it seems, is a place where people feel entirely uninhibited about expressing their hatred and xenophobia. Images from around the country show a level of brutalization that hasn’t been witnessed for some time, and attest to primitive instincts long believed to have been relegated to the past in Germany. The examples are as myriad as they are shocking, and include … the mock gallows for Angela Merkel and her deputy Sigmar Gabriel carried by a demonstrator at a Pegida rally in Dresden on Oct. 12,  [and] the abuse shouted at the German chancellor when she visited a refugee hostel in Heidenau near Dresden in August, where she was called a “slut” and other insults, [and] the placards held aloft by demonstrators on the first anniversary of the Pegida rallies listing the supposed “enemies of the German state” – Merkel, Gabriel and their “accomplices”. …

So the Spiegel sees the “myriad” protests. But so what, it implies, if they are spontaneous expressions by ever-growing numbers of Germans against the invasion of their country by a very dark force? The popular will is evil, it echoes Germany’s evil past, it cannot be allowed.

As the authorities will not listen to popular protest, some Germans are resorting to violence against the invaders:

There have been more than twice as many attacks on refugee hostels during the first nine months of this year as in the whole of 2014.

So now the rising tide of protest – called by the Spiegel a “rising tide of hatred” – is at last getting the attention of the politicians:

The rising tide of hatred is now reaching the politicians many hold responsible for the perceived chaos besetting Germany.

Those evil protestors “perceive” chaos. The implication is that chaos is not really there – the Spiegel denying it even as it describes it.

The national headquarters of Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union party in Berlin fields thousands of hate mails every week. As the architect of the “we can do it” policy of allowing masses of refugees into the country, Chancellor Merkel is their primary target. …

The article includes many individual examples of expression of protest, or “hate”, aimed at the policy and those who are responsible for it. It all amounts to a a spreading, deepening resistance of very large number of Germans. But to the Spiegel it has no legitimacy. It is wrong.

The hatred comes in many forms. It’s expressed on the streets and on the Internet. Sometimes it’s loud. Other times it’s unspoken. It eminates from every class and every section of society. According to studies conducted by Andreas Zick, the respected head of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence at the University of Bielefeld, who has been researching German prejudices against different groups for many years, almost 50 percent of Germans harbor misanthropic views. Zick warns of a shift in norms that will be difficult to get back under control.

So it is prejudice. And there has been “a shift in norms”. No recognition that the normal has been changed radically.

How does the Spiegel think the politicians in this so-called democracy should respond? By changing the policy that “almost 50 per cent” of Germans don’t like? Absolutely not.

Politicians need to find a way of dealing with rampant hatred. Dialogue and compromise – the bedrock of Germany’s culture of debate – no longer appear to be working at the moment. It’s hard to get through to people who have been consumed with a hysterical degree of hatred.

Hatred for which the Spiegel, and Merkel, and the Left can see absolutely no good reason!

Rather than heed the voice of the people, get the security agencies on the job. Revive the Stasi. Or import the Saudi Arabian idea of a Moral Police Force.

The country’s security agencies also need to take a decisive stance. Are they once again being too slow in monitoring and clamping down on this new radical scene?

Because you see, it is just like the rise of Nazism all over again.

And so it is. But the Nazi-like thinking is not on the part of the protestors – it is on the part of Spiegel, Merkel, and the Left.

Happily, there is a sign of some moral health in the German states, in that not all the forces of law and order look at what’s happening in the same way:

In most states, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency is not keeping tabs on Pegida. Theoretically, however, police and public prosecutors do have the tools to take action to squash troublemakers. …

Even as the organized far-right is exploiting public unease about the refugee crisis and frustrated citizens are venting their anger in hate mails, the authorities’ response has been astonishingly weak. Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière might describe Pegida’s leaders as “hard-core right-wing extremists” but the domestic intelligence service he oversees states that it isn’t even monitoring the movement — so far, it says, there has been insufficient reason to do so.

Gordian Meyer-Plath, president of the Saxony branch of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, also seems reluctant to take on the increasingly radical movement. “We’re not watching it,” he says, because the argument that it is harmless has so far prevailed. Its organizers distanced themselves from violence, for example. “People held up pictures of Merkel in an SA uniform at the demonstrations,” says Meyer-Plath. “Real neo-Nazis would never do that.” So far, he maintains, it’s a “populist far-right movement rooted in anger but not a threat to German’s freedom and democracy.”

“We cannot label every anti-asylum-seeker protest as being far-right,” he says.

So sense is prevailing in places where it counts.

But not everywhere. The Spiegel is happy to find that in some of the states the intelligence services share its view:

But intelligence services in other states beg to differ. Pegida movements in Duisburg, Düsseldorf and Thuringia are officially being watched, with authorities concluding that the majority of organizers and speakers belong to the far-right scene.

And now comes the most revealing paragraph in the whole article. Revealing of the mental acrobatics the Left has to put itself through in order to find some evidence in the real world for its preferred version of reality:

The authorities were even stymied by the blog Politically Incorrect, deciding that although it propagates anti-Islamic and often racist propaganda, “it does not use typical far-right argumentation” – as the authorities put it in response to an inquiry from the Left Party. The authors of the blog have so far managed to out-manoeuver the authorities by using two simple tricks. Firstly, its stance is overtly pro-American and pro-Israeli, which appears to confuse the German bureaucrats, who assume that to be a neo-Nazi is to be anti-Semitic. Secondly, the most egregious expressions of vitriol appear in the comments, for which the blog’s authors cannot be held responsible.

So there is a blog, encouragingly called Politically Incorrect (PI), which is anti-Islamic, and pro-Israeli, and pro-American – views that are “typically far-right” in the Spiegel’s view. And according to the Spiegel, it says it is pro-American and pro-Israel, not because it is, but only as a trick, to throw dust in the eyes of the Spiegel-Merkel School of Pro-Islam Thought. These bloggers are disguising their neo-Nazism by pretending not to be anti-Semitic so they will cunningly deceive the naive bureaucrats into believing they are not neo-Nazi!

For the Left, all opposition to the Muslim mass immigration must be neo-Nazi.

These wicked pro-America and pro-Israel bloggers have been under surveillance for a couple of years now:

In 2013, the Bavarian intelligence service became the first to start observing PI, a move prompted by the blog’s industrious Munich chapter, headed up by the rabidly anti-Islamic Michael Stürzenberger, a frequent speaker at Pegida rallies. …

To be anti-Islam is to be rabid. Mad like a rabid dog. What sane person can possibly find cause to take an unfavorable view of Islam?

To the Spiegel’s regret, even some politicians close to Merkel are beginning to sense that her policy of opening the door to unlimited numbers of Muslims might have its down side.

But now, as if a different writer were taking over at this point in the article, a new picture emerges:

After months of attacking critics of Merkel’s immigration policies as right-wing xenophobes, Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier conceded that the migration crisis risks tearing German society apart. In a joint essay published by Der Spiegel, the two wrote: “We cannot indefinitely absorb and integrate more than one million refugees each year.”

One million! Each year! That’s a small number?

Bavarian Finance Minister Markus Söder said: “We need to be clear that there must be limits and quotas for immigration — we cannot save the whole world. The refugee influx will not be stopped unless we secure our borders and send a clear signal that not everyone can come to Germany.”

Former Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich described Merkel’s immigration policy as an “unprecedented political blunder” that will have “devastating long-term consequences”. He said the job of politics is to think beyond the present and make decisions for the future. In view of the massive flows of migrants into Germany without any police checks, Friedrich concluded: “We have lost control.” He added:

It is totally irresponsible that tens of thousands of people are flowing into the country uncontrolled and unregistered, and we can only unreliably estimate exactly how many of them are Islamic State fighters or Islamist sleepers. I am convinced that no other country in the world would be so naive and starry-eyed to expose itself to such a risk.

Except perhaps the US under Obama.

CDU lawmaker Michael Stübgen said: “The disagreement [with Merkel] is fundamental. Our capacities are exhausted and there is concern that the system will implode if we do not regain control of our borders. But the chancellor disagrees and so the conflict is unsolved.”

On October 21, more than 200 mayors in North-Rhine Westphalia signed an open letter to Merkel, in which they warned they were no longer capable of taking in any more migrants. The letter states:

We are seriously concerned for our country and the cities and towns we represent. The reason: the massive and mostly uncontrolled flow of migrants to Germany and our cities and towns. All available housing possibilities are exhausted, including tents and shipping containers. Managing the migrant shelters is so time intensive that our personnel can no longer attend to other municipal responsibilities.” …

So is Merkel defeated? Has she blown it? Is her time over?

In an October 26 column for the Financial Times, titled The End of the Merkel Era is Within Sight, Gideon Rachman wrote:

The refugee crisis that has broken over Germany is likely to spell the end of the Merkel era. With the country in line to receive more than a million asylum-seekers this year alone, public anxiety is mounting — and so is criticism of Ms. Merkel, from within her own party. Some of her close political allies acknowledge that it is now distinctly possible that the chancellor will have to leave office, before the next general election in 2017. Even if she sees out a full term, the notion of a fourth Merkel administration, widely discussed a few months ago, now seems improbable… The trouble is that Ms. Merkel’s government has clearly lost control of the situation. German officials publicly endorse the chancellor’s declaration that “We can do this'”. But there is panic just beneath the surface: costs are mounting, social services are creaking, Ms. Merkel’s poll ratings are falling and far-right violence is on the rise.

So, although this journalist records that the voters will probably reject Merkel’s re-election because she has done this catastrophic thing to Germany, the violent reaction is still to be called “far-right”.

As the placid surface of German society is disturbed, so arguments about the positive economic and demographic impact of immigration are losing their impact. Instead, fears about the long-term social and political effect of taking in so many newcomers — particularly from the imploding Middle East — are gaining ground. Meanwhile, refugees are still heading into Germany — at a rate of around 10,000 a day. (By contrast, Britain is volunteering to accept 20,000 Syrian refugees over four years.)…

Some voters seem to have concluded that Mutti [“Mummy” – Merkel’s affectionate nickname] has gone mad — flinging open Germany’s borders to the wretched of the earth...

The refugee crisis marks a turning point. The decade after Ms. Merkel first came to power in 2005 now looks like a blessed period for Germany, in which the country was able to enjoy peace, prosperity and international respect, while keeping the troubles of the world at a safe distance. That golden era is now over.

Merkel has made her case for opening the floodgates of Germany  – and of Europe – to a hostile and destructive force on the grounds of “humanitarian concern”. (The leftist British newspaper The Guardian sets out the case here.)

Let’s assume they really are refugees. And let’s accept that what European leaders like Merkel want to do is extend humanitarian assistance to them. Is there no other way of doing that than by letting them come and live in Europe?

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in his Madrid speech: ” Our moral responsibility is to give back these people their homes and their countries. It can’t be our objective to provide them with a new European life. Right to human dignity and security are basic rights [so] we have to help them to get back their own lives with dignity and we have to send them back to their own countries.”

But that idea made no impression on Angela Merkel. “Humanitarian concern” is plainly her motive. She has given no other reason. Her need to do this would not be satisfied by returning the “refugees” to their countries of origin. She needs to do far more than help them regain “dignity and security”. She needs to embrace them, take them into Germany, and lavish loving care on them.

The Spiegel (the “Mirror”) reflects this need when it claims that letting in the Muslim masses is good for “the country’s image abroad”.

Why should a need to show “humanitaran concern” with such hospitality override all other considerations?

Why should a German leader need to show, as a paramount cause, that her country is humane?

Do we need to ask? Germany was a prime mover in the wildly unrealistic scheme of creating a united Europe, and the reason why was its need to dissolve its guilt for the Holocaust by becoming part of a larger entity. And it seems that a fog of guilt or shame still hangs over the German psyche. Or over the psyches of many Germans.

Show the world how compassionate we really are. Wipe out the stain of the Holocaust. Import millions of “refugees” from the Third World, and maybe we will at last be forgiven – or forgive ourselves – for  having massacred our Jewish citizens and attempted genocide throughout Europe. Is that what is moving Angela Merkel?

But what Merkel and Spiegel and all the rest of the bien pensants who are putting on their haloes may not have intended, may not have let themselves foresee, is that their self-serving action must destroy Germany.

And Europe – its union of nations and the nations themselves.

But if national suicide is a just penance for Germany, is it just  – you might ask – that Germany should destroy the rest of Europe too?

And we might reply: Well, didn’t most of the rest of Europe collaborate with them in their genocide?

Now we do not think that Europe should destroy itself because it became too morally atrocious to deserve to survive.

But there are those who are murmuring that the great goddess Nemesis – in whom of course we do not believe – seems to be of a different opinion.