Germany – Helian Unbound

Vignette of a Moderate Leftist

Scott Alexander is a U.S. psychiatrist and proprietor of Slate Star Codex, which he describes as “a blog about science, medicine, philosophy, politics, and futurism.” He considers himself a moderate liberal. In a recent post entitled Neutral vs. Conservative: The Eternal Struggle, he discussed Donald Trump and the rise of tribal epistemology, an article published by David Roberts on Vox, the burden of which was that truth, justice, and moral rectitude are all under assault thanks to the rise of ideological tribalism on the right. In Roberts’ words,

Over time, this leads to what you might call tribal epistemology: Information is evaluated based not on conformity to common standards of evidence or correspondence to a common understanding of the world, but on whether it supports the tribe’s values and goals and is vouchsafed by tribal leaders. “Good for our side” and “true” begin to blur into one…Now tribal epistemology has found its way to the White House…

Conservative media… profits from… a constant state of mobilized outrage.

This is the culmination of the right’s long campaign against media: a base that only trusts tribal news from tribal sources.

I suspect that if Roberts seriously expects us to believe that the traditional media don’t (or at least didn’t used to) support leftist tribal values and goals, that it is uncommon for leftist ideologues to be in a constant state of mobilized outrage, and that leftists commonly seek sources of news outside of their usual echo chambers, then clearly he has a pair of tribalist blinkers ensconced firmly at the end of his own nose. Of course we all do. We are a profoundly tribalist species, perceiving the world in terms of just and good ingroups and evil and deplorable outgroups. But that’s beside the point. The point is that Roberts suffers from the delusion that he’s somehow immune to tribalism. In fact, however, he wears the insignia of his tribe on his sleeve.

The article is full of ideologically slanted claims about conservative delusions spawned by conservative media misinformation. Roberts clearly lacks even an elementary capacity to detect the slant in his own sources. To give just one example among the many, he cites “studies” according to which Fox viewers are more misinformed than those who rely on the traditional media. Even a cursory glance at the things they are misinformed about reveals that they are carefully chosen to insure that conservatives are more prone to “delusions.” For example, they were more likely to believe that “’weapons of mass destruction’ had been found in (Iraq) after the U.S. invasion, when they hadn’t,” they “were less likely to say the Earth’s temperature has been rising and less likely to attribute this temperature increase to human activities,” and were liable of a host of false beliefs about Obamacare. I could easily stand these studies on their heads by simply loading the questions with bits cherry-picked from the narratives of the Left instead of the Right. For example, the questions might include, “Are there significant differences in intelligence between different human ethnic groups?” “Is human biodiversity real and significant?” “According to Muslim teaching will most Christians burn in hell forever or not, and are women inferior to men or not?” “Did Michael Brown have his hands up and shout ‘don’t shoot’ when he was killed?” “Was Hillary Clinton’s use of private computer resources to handle official government business a significant violation of federal regulations and the law?” And so on.

Roberts goes on to promote doubling down on his tribe’s warfare against its conservative outgroup under the rubric of a return to the “traditional” techniques of supplying the public with information, concluding with the grim comment that,

There’s no other choice. In the end, if tribal epistemology wins, journalism loses.

I have news for Roberts. Tribal epistemology won a long time ago. All the evils he wrings his hands about are the inevitable result of marginalizing and vilifying the tribe that lost.

Which brings us back to our “moderate” leftist, Scott Alexander. Alexander doesn’t disagree with Roberts about tribalism on the right. He just prefers a different approach to dealing with it. He is St. Francis to Roberts’ Torquemada, if you will. He would rather bring erring conservatives back to the True Faith with a kid glove rather than an iron fist. For example, he suggests that some of the “studies” Roberts relies on to portray conservatives as deplorable might conceivably be affected by a liberal bias. He even admits that mainstream media outlets like CNN “lean liberal,” but claims they are not as liberal as Fox is conservative. That’s debatable. You can demonstrate that to yourself by simply turning on CNN every half hour or so over any six hour period. I can pretty much guarantee that the majority of time, and probably the vast majority of the time, you will be watching something that reflects negatively on Trump. Fox certainly opposed Obama, but was never as afflicted with single-minded hatred as CNN. Alexander thinks that CNN’s bogus pretense of neutrality is a feature, not a bug. I beg to differ. I prefer a news outlet that is open about its agenda to one that blatantly lies about it.

As we read further into the post, we find Alexander painting a rosy picture of the past. He tells us that there was once some kind of a Golden Age when, “the two parties had much more in common, and (were) able to appeal to shared gatekeeper institutions that both trusted.” Maybe, but it must have been long before my time. Now, however, all that has changed. In his words, “Right now, the neutral gatekeeper institutions have tried being biased against conservatives.” I rather think that “the neutral gatekeeper institutions have tried being biased against conservatives” for a lot longer than he imagines. Conservatives just weren’t as effective in pushing back then as they are now. Among other things, they lacked the means to do so. Now they have the means. Both Roberts and Alexander agree that this is a deplorable situation. They concur that the outgroup, the “other” tribe is evil, and must be defanged. This ingroup/outgroup aspect of human nature, what Robert Ardrey called the “Amity-Enmity Complex,” should already be familiar to readers of this blog. The process by which Alexander manages to convince himself that the “other” is, indeed, evil is interesting in itself. He begins by continuing with his “kid glove” approach, debunking Roberts’ claim that, “the right has not sought greater fairness in mainstream institutions; it has defected to create its own,” rightly noting that,

This is a bizarre claim, given the existence of groups like Accuracy in Media, Media Research Center, Newsbusters, Heterodox Academy, et cetera, which are all about the right seeking greater fairness in mainstream institutions, some of which are almost fifty years old… The way I remember it, conservatives spent about thirty years alternatively pleading, demanding, suing, legislating, and literally praying for greater fairness in mainstream institutions, and it was basically all just hitting their heads against a brick wall. They then defected to create their own.

However, “creating their own” turned out to be the original sin.Here’s how Alexander describes the process:

A couple of years ago, Reddit decided to ban various undesirables and restrict discussion of offensive topics. A lot of users were really angry about this, and some of them set up a Reddit clone called Voat which promised that everyone was welcome regardless of their opinion.

What happened was – a small percent of average Reddit users went over, lured by curiosity or a principled commitment to free speech. And also, approximately 100% of Reddit’s offensive undesirables went there, lured by the promise of being able to be terrible and get away with it.

Even though Voat’s rules were similar to Reddit’s rules before the latter tightened its moderation policies, Voat itself was nothing like pre-tightening Reddit. I checked to see whether it had gotten any better in the last year, and I found the top three stories were:

SJW Awareness is a Steam curator that warns you about SJW games.

Africans describe their extortion schemes. They put babies in ovens and hot showers. They’re now migrating to EU.

“The Phantom,” and black serial killer who targeted blond haired white children, has been freed from prison and roaming streets of same city he terrorized.

The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.

In the first place, this is anecdotal evidence.In the second, at least two of the above blurbs are true. If Alexander doesn’t think that there are video games that come drenched in crude leftist propaganda, he must not have played many video games. If he did, he probably wouldn’t be too annoyed at discovering that his game was actually a leftist morality play in disguise, but some people are. As can be confirmed on Google, a black serial killer who targeted blonde haired white children actually was freed from prison in the same city where he committed his crimes. I would certainly deem this information useful if I had young children and the killer was released in my neighborhood. It would seem, then, that Alexander doesn’t think Voat is a “terrible place to live” because it is full of lies. Rather, its “seven zillion witches” are publishing truths that clash with Alexander’s preferred narrative, and he equates truth that clash with his narrative as evil.

After supplying us with this somewhat shaky evidence that Voat is inhabited by witches, Alexander reaches the dubious conclusion that all other right-leaning media outlets must therefore also be inhabited almost exclusively by witches as well. For example, it turns out that Fox was the unholy spawn of a similar process:

FOX’s slogans are “Fair and Balanced”, “Real Journalism”, and “We Report, You Decide”. They were pushing the “actually unbiased media” angle hard. I don’t know if this was ever true, or if people really believed it. It doesn’t matter. By attracting only the refugees from a left-slanted system, they ensured they would end up not just with conservatives, but with the worst and most extreme conservatives.

No doubt Alexander would find anyone who kicked at the ideological planks that form the box his tribe lives in “bad” and “extreme.”He challenges some of the more crudely biased “studies” cited by Roberts, but doesn’t neglect to virtue signal to his readers that “Fox is horrible.” Noting that Breitbart, Drudge, and the rest are just as horrible, he adds,

I think it’s right that this situation is horrible and toxic and destroying the country, and it’s really good that someone has pointed this out and framed it this clearly.

I don’t see it that way. I could care less whether Alexander’s tribe considers Fox and the rest “horrible.” They’re either making a moral judgment that lacks any legitimate basis and is nothing more significant than an expression of their emotional whims, or they’re suggesting that these alternative media do not supply useful information, which is false. The mainstream media will occasionally lie or manipulate facts to alter their meaning. Usually, however, they simply suppress any news that doesn’t fit their narrative. Conservative media supply these often significant facts, which are only “horrible” because they contradict that narrative. As a result, the United States has a more genuinely free press than many other countries where similarly powerful and influential alternatives are lacking.

For example, I happen to follow the German media fairly closely. They have no equivalent of Fox, and to an outside observer the media there are as similar to each other as so many peas in a pod, all flogging almost exactly the same political line when it comes to any issue of overriding significance. Among other things, this vanilla approach to journalism convinces citizens that they are much better informed than they actually are. When it comes to the United States, for example, they are fed a dumbed down version of the U.S. mainstream media narrative, typically much cruder and more extreme than anything you’ll find in this country. That’s exactly what we would have here lacking credible alternatives like Fox, Breitbart, Drudge, Instapundit, etc., whether Alexander imagines they’re full of scary witches or not. Alexander concludes his article with the following three paragraphs:

Look. I read Twitter. I know the sorts of complaints people have about this blog. I’m some kind of crypto-conservative, I’m a traitor to liberalism, I’m too quick to sell out under the guise of “compromise”. And I understand the sentiment. I write a lot about how we shouldn’t get our enemies fired lest they try to fire us, how we shouldn’t get our enemies’ campus speakers disinvited lest they try to disinvite ours, how we shouldn’t use deceit and hyperbole to push our policies lest our enemies try to push theirs the same way. And people very reasonably ask – hey, I notice my side kind of controls all of this stuff, the situation is actually asymmetrical, they have no way of retaliating, maybe we should just grind our enemies beneath our boots this one time.

And then when it turns out that the enemies can just leave and start their own institutions, with horrendous results for everybody, the cry goes up “Wait, that’s unfair! Nobody ever said you could do that! Come back so we can grind you beneath our boots some more!”

Conservatives aren’t stuck in here with us. We’re stuck in here with them. And so far it’s not going so well. I’m not sure if any of this can be reversed. But I think maybe we should consider to what degree we are in a hole, and if so, to what degree we want to stop digging.

I agree that leftists like Roberts and Alexander are in a hole, but they can’t stop digging. Their ideology constrains them to keep those shovels flying. The only real way to stop would involve them challenging their own ideological preconceptions. However, their tribe is defined by ideology, so to challenge the ideology would mean ostracism – banishment from the tribe. Alexander admits he has already been denounced as a traitor and a sellout merely for advocating a milder approach. The lightening is poised to strike even though he hasn’t dared to lay so much as a finger on the fundamental shibboleths of his ingroup. There is no significant ideological difference at all between Roberts and Alexander. They only differ on how to guide the erring sheep back into the fold of the True Faith. That’s the problem. To actually stop digging, the leftists would have to admit that they may not be 100% right all the time, and that the conservatives may actually be right about some things. They can’t do that because of the way they define membership in their ingroup. It would be something like St. Francis (or Torquemada) admitting that Christianity is mostly true, but the pagans might have a point about the existence of some of their gods. If the leftists, who are anything but “neutral,” want to lay down their shovels, the only solution is to leave their ingroup. However, it is usually very painful and traumatic for members of our species to do that. They’re likely to be down there a good, long time.

On the Hatred of the “Anti-Haters”

Europe is an amazing sight these days. The leftists are doing what leftists do – fighting to eliminate any semblance of recognizable borders or national sovereignty, encouraging hordes of culturally alien immigrants to pour into the continent in the process. All this is being done in the name of “morality,” more or less in the same sense as one might jump off a cliff in the name of “getting exercise.” Leftists, whether they nominally belong to the “conservative” or “liberal” parties, control the media, the schools, the churches, and state power. But in spite of an unprecedented barrage of propaganda from all those sources, the populations of the countries concerned are starting to demonstrate a slight uneasiness, or, if you will, common sense. They know that, historically, allowing the numbers of unassimilable aliens in ones country to increase beyond a certain point has invariably resulted in violent social unrest, and occasionally civil war. They would prefer to avoid those outcomes. Denied any democratic means of expressing their opinions via, for example, plebiscites, some of them have taken to the streets in protest. The response of their masters has been remarkable. Aware that they lack any semblance of a democratic mandate for the profound and likely irreversible changes they have been making to Europe’s demographic and cultural landscape, and also aware that the people are not with them, they have reacted with what one might describe as a form of hysteria.

Germany, of course, has been taking a leading role in destabilizing the continent in keeping with time-honored tradition. As I have German relatives and a German wife, I pay particular attention happenings there. As examples of what I have described above as the hysteria of the string pullers in that country, one might consider the following:

Some of the first German citizens to take to the streets were loosely organized under the rubric of “PEGIDA,” (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes, or Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident.) Several similar groups have emerged since then. For the most part, they consist of citizens who simply gather in the streets and occasionally conduct peaceful marches. In other words, they are people who “peaceably assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances.” According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), the response has been to intimidate them with threats of surveillance by the local equivalent of the FBI, rationalized by the claim that they are all merely puppets in the hands of right wing fringe elements.
The “respectable” and “conservative FAZ also “informed” its readers about PEGIDA by publishing an interview with one Hajo Funke, described as an “extremism researcher.” Readers are left trembling over accounts of supposed “connections” between PEGIDA and the murder of Cologne’s mayor by right wingers. U.S. readers should be familiar with this rather hackneyed tactic of claiming that whatever heinous crimes can be exploited for the purpose were “inspired” by whatever group one wants to smear.
Media giant ARD ran a story about a “chain of lights,” made up of citizens holding candles and torches to welcome immigrants. Some of the supposed images of the event turned out to be fake, and were actually taken at a different event back in 2003.
Not to be outdone, Der Spiegel, Germany’s largest news magazine, cites supposed incidents of “hatemongering” against immigrants on YouTube, and “inciting the populace” on Facebook, with allusions of ongoing government investigations of the “extremists.” Focus magazine chimes in that one of these Facebook extremists has just been sentenced to more than two years in prison for “agitating against immigrants.” That should “get his mind right.”

Anyone who suggests that the government might want to assume some elementary level of control over the borders and pause in implementing its radical policies until the citizens have been allowed to weigh in on the matter is commonly described in the German media as a “hater.” This is particularly true of any mention of the subject in Der Spiegel. That’s a bit rich considering that Der Spiegel takes the cake among German hatemongers in this century, and would have gotten at least an honorable mention in the last.

Der Spiegel was in the very vanguard of the lucrative game of peddling hate against the United States during the latest European orgasm of anti-Americanism which reached its peak about a decade ago. Many of the most egregious examples were documented on Davids Medienkritik, now mothballed but still an excellent source of historical source material. I encourage readers to visit the site and page back to the posts prior to, say 2008. Among other things, Medienkritik put together a collage of Spiegel covers that pretty much says it all when it comes to hatred.

Have a look and you’ll see examples of some of Spiegel’s favorite quasi-racist anti-American stereotypes. Of course, the gun nut and religious fanatic are there, as well as well as such favorite themes as Americans exploiting German workers, torturing prisoners, trading “blood for oil,” etc. Such relentlessly negative coverage of the United States occasionally reached levels that can only be described as fanatical, crowding out virtually all other news on Spiegel’s website.

At the crest of the anti-American wave in Germany, one found similar “news” stories in virtually every German publication worth mentioning, from the left wing Der Spiegel to the “conservative” FAZ to the neo-Nazi Deutsche National-Zeitung. Standing bravely in opposition to this wave of xenophobic hate, calling for some modicum of rational and fair treatment of the United States, were a few little bloggers. These people had nothing to gain from resisting the hatemongers, went almost completely unnoticed in the United States, and were subjected to vilification and hacking attacks in their own country. They certainly deserve our gratitude. As it happens, one of the most active of these little blogs went by the name of Politically Incorrect. It’s editor was a reliable voice against the pervasive peddling of hate at Spiegel and elsewhere. The blog still exists. It should come as no surprise that it is now taking a stand against the suicidal policies of the German regime.

Of course, according to the editors of Der Spiegel, Politically Incorrect’s resistance to the uncontrolled deluge of “asylum seekers,” land it among the “inciters of the German Volk,” the “promoters of murder,” the “right wing extremists,” the “neo-Nazis,” and, in a word, the “haters.” In fact, the real haters in Germany are to be found elsewhere. Readers should find a clue about where to look for them if they take a close look at Medienkritik’s collage of magazine covers.

I noted in my recent posts on James Burnham how well he exposed the sources of the current push to eliminate borders and allow the free movement of human populations across the globe in liberal fantasies of universal human brotherhood. I can think of no better demonstration of the delusional nature of this goal than the spectacle of the bitter and fanatical hatreds of the very people who are foremost in attempting to force it down the throats of their fellow citizens. Their hate hasn’t gone anywhere. They’ve merely found a different outgroup to hate, in the form of anyone who dares to oppose their ideological shibboleths. And in the end, that’s why their current experiment in destabilizing their own countries is most unlikely to end well. As the rage of these “anti-haters” against anyone who stands in their way becomes ever more hysterical, they expose themselves as the most virulent haters of all.

The Great European Morality Inversion

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know my take on morality. It is the manifestation of a subset of our suite of innate behavioral traits. The traits in question exist because they evolved. Absent those traits, morality as we know it would not exist. It follows that attempts to apply moral emotions in order to solve complex problems that arise in an environment that is radically different from the one in which the innate, “root causes” of morality evolved are irrational. That, however, is precisely how the Europeans are attempting to deal with an unprecedented flood of culturally and genetically alien refugees. The result is predictable – a classic morality inversion.

The situation is unfolding just as Jonathan Haidt described it in his paper, The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail. As he put it,

…moral reasoning does not cause moral judgment; rather, moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction, generated after a judgment has been reached.

In other words, the “emotional dog” makes the judgment. Only after the judgment has been made does the “rational tail” begin “wagging the dog,” concocting good sounding “reasons” for the judgment. One can get a better idea of what’s really going on by tracking down the source of the moral emotions involved.

Let’s consider, then, what’s going on inside the “pro-refugee” brain. As in every other brain, the moral machinery distinguishes between ingroup and outgroup(s). In this case these categories are perceived primarily in ideological terms. The typical pro-refugee individual is often a liberal, as that rather slippery term is generally understood in the context of 21st century western democracies. Such specimens will occasionally claim that they have expanded their ingroup to include “all mankind,” so that it is no longer possible for them to be “haters.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The outgroup have ye always with you. It comes with the human behavioral package.

If anything, the modern liberal hates more violently than any other subgroup. He commonly hates the people within his own culture who disagree with the shibboleths of his ideology. Those particular “others,” almost always constitute at least a part of his outgroup. Outside of his own culture, ideology matters much less as a criterion of outgroup identification, as demonstrated, for example, by the odd affinity between many Western liberals and radical Islamists.

Beyond that, however, he is hardly immune from the more traditional forms of tribalism. For example, European liberals typically hate the United States. The intensity of that hatred tends to rise and fall over time, but can sometimes reach almost incredible levels. The most recent eruption occurred around the year 2000. Interestingly enough, one of the most spectacular examples occurred in Germany, the very country that now takes the cake for moralistic grandstanding in the matter of refugees. Der Spiegel, its number one news magazine, was certainly in the avant-garde of the orgasm of hatred. It was often difficult to find any news about Germany on the homepage of its website, so filled was it with furious, spittle-flinging rants about the imagined evils of “die Amerikaner.” However, virtually every other major German “news” outlet, whether it was nominally “liberal” or “conservative,” eventually jointed the howling pack. The most vicious examples of anti-American hate were typically found in just those publications that are now quick to denounce German citizens who express concern about the overwhelming waves of refugees now pouring into the country as “haters.”

On the other hand, refugees, or at least those of the type now pouring into Europe, seldom turn up in any of these common outgroups of the modern liberal. They land squarely in his ingroup. Humans are generally inclined to help ingroup members who, like the refugees, appear to be in trouble. This is doubly true of the liberal, who piques himself on what he imagines to be his moral superiority. Furthermore, as the refugees can be portrayed as victims of colonialism and imperialism, one might say they are a “most favored subset” of the ingroup. Throw in a few pictures of drowned children, impoverished women begging for help, etc., and all the moral ingredients are there to render the liberal an impassioned defender of the masses of humanity drawing a bead on his country. Nothing gives him more self-righteous joy than imagining himself a “savior.” This explains the fact that liberals are eternally in the process of “saving” one group of unfortunates or another without ever getting around to accomplishing anything actually recognizable as salvation. All the pleasure is in the charade. We find the same phenomenon whether its a matter of “saving” the environment, “saving” the planet from global warming, or “saving” the poor. For the liberal, the pose is everything, and the reality nothing.

Which brings us back to the theme of this post. All the sublime moral emotions now at play in the “salvation” of the refugees have an uncanny resemblance to many other instances of moral behavior as practiced by the modern liberal. They have a tendency to favor an outcome which is the opposite of what the same moral emotions accomplished at an earlier time, and that led to their preservation by natural selection to begin with. In a word, as noted above, we are witnessing yet another classic morality inversion.

Why an inversion? At the most fundamental level, because it will lead to the diminution or elimination of the genes whose survival a similar response once favored. At the moment, the pro-refugee side is calling the shots. It controls the governments of all the major European states. All of them more or less fit the pattern described above, whether they are nominally “liberal” or “conservative.” Indeed, foremost among them is Germany’s “conservative’ regime, which has positively invited a flood of alien refugees across its borders. Based on historical precedent, the outcome of all this altruism isn’t difficult to foresee. In terms of “culture” it will be a future of ethnic and religious strife, possibly leading to civil war. Genetically, it amounts to an attempt at ethnic suicide. I am well aware that these outcomes are disputed by those promoting the refugee inundation. However, I consider it pointless to argue about it. I am content to let history judge.

While we bide our time waiting for the train wreck to unfold, it may be of interest to examine some of the techniques being used to maintain this remarkable instance of moralistic play-acting. I take most of my examples from the German media, which includes some of the most avid refugee cheerleaders. Predictably, outgroup vilification is part of the mix. As noted above, anyone who objects to the flood of refugees is almost universally denounced as a “hater” by just those people who wear their own virulent hatreds on their sleeves while pretending they don’t exist. Of course, there are also the usual hackneyed violations of Godwin’s Law. For example, Jacob Augstein, leftwing stalwart for Der Spiegel, denounces them as “Browns” (i.e., brownshirts, Nazis) in a recent column. On the “positive” side, the “conservative” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung optimistically suggests that the refugees will promote economic growth. According to another article in Der Spiegel, the eastern Europeans, who are not quite so refugee-friendly as the Germans, are “blowing their chance.” The ominous byline reads,

Europe is shrinking. The demographic downtrend is particularly dramatic in the eastern part of the continent, where the population is literally dying out. In spite of that, Hungary, Poland and company are resisting immigration. They will regret it.

In other words, before turning out the lights and committing suicide, the eastern Europeans should make sure an alien culture is in place to take over their territories when they’re gone. Of course, this flies in the face of the impassioned rhetoric the liberals have been feeding us about the need to reduce the surface population if we are to have an environmentally sustainable planet.

I note in passing that the European elites that are driving this process now seem to have taken a step back from the brink. They are having second thoughts. They realize that they don’t have their populations behind them, and that their defiance of popular opinion might eventually threaten their own power. As a result, the number of news articles about the refugees and their plight is only a shadow of what it was only a few weeks ago. Mild reservations about refugee wowserism are starting to appear even in such gung-ho forums as Der Spiegel where, as I write this, the lead article on their homepage is entitled “Now Things Are Getting Uncomfortable.” Ya think!? The byline reads,

There is a chance in tone in the refugee crisis. SPD (German Social Democratic Party) chief Gabriel warms about limits to Germany’s ability to absorb refugees. Minister of the Interior de Maziere deplores the misbehavior of many migrants. The pressure on Chancellor Merkel is increasing.

“Ought” the Europeans to alter their behavior? Is what they consider “good” really “evil?” Are they ignoring the real “goal” of natural selection? Certainly not, at least from an objective point of view. There is no objective criterion for determining what anyone “ought” to do, anymore than there is an objective way to distinguish the difference between things, such as good and evil, that have no objective existence. They are hardly failing to move towards the “goal” of natural selection, since that process does not have either a purpose or a goal. As you may have gathered, my own subjective whim is to oppose unlimited immigration. I have, however, not the slightest basis for declaring that anyone who doesn’t agree with me is “evil.” At best, I can try to explain my own whims.

I’m what you might call a moral compatibilist. I see myself sitting at the end of a chain of life spawned by genetic material that has evolved over a period of more than three billions years, surviving and reproducing over that incredible gulf of time via an almost infinite array of successive forms, culminating in the species to which I now belong. I consider the whole process, and the universe I live in, awesome and wonderful. Subjectively, it seems to me “good” to act in a way that is compatible with the natural processes that have given me life. It follows that, from my own, individual, subjective point of view, I “should” seek to preserve that life and pass it on into the indefinite future.

I have not the slightest basis for claiming that “my way” is better than the whimsical behavior of those I see around me exultantly pursuing their morality inversions. At best, I must limit myself to observing that “my way” seems more consistent.

On the “Good Guys” and “Bad Guys” of World War I

More than a century has now come and gone since the start of World War I. Numerous books and articles have been published to mark the centennial, often differing sharply with each other in their interpretations of the events and personalities concerned. My personal favorite is The Sleepwalkers, by Christopher Clark. I’ve been reading quite a bit of the source material myself lately. As I speak German, these have included memoirs of many of the key players on the German side. In reading his book, I noticed that Clark was very familiar with everything I’d read. I also noticed that everything I’ve read was a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the material he quoted in detail. Clark also generally refrains from categorizing every historical personality as either a “good guy” or a “bad guy.” I avoid reading histories written by journalists, because so few of them manage to avoid this moralistic pigeonholing. It’s much easier to understand historical events if, as Clark puts it in his introduction, one “remains alert to the fact that the people, events and forces described… carried in them the seeds of other, perhaps less terrible, futures.”

Not everyone agrees with Clark. Even a century later there are others, even among professional historians, who remain obsessed with the question of “war guilt.” For example, John C. G. Röhl, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Sussex, recently published a life of Kaiser Wilhelm II, in which he insisted that Germany’s last Kaiser managed to concoct World War I almost single-handedly. I’ve also seen several articles, such as this one that appeared on the conservative Australian Quadrant website, that are still harping about “German militarism” as if the war had ended yesterday. If the Quadrant author is to be believed, the “ideological and cultural pathologies” of Wilhelmine Germany were direct forerunners of Nazism.

I doubt it. Germany could certainly have broken the chain of events that led to war. So could Austria-Hungary, and so could Russia. The question of who, among these three, not to mention the other belligerents, was really the chief culprit was hardly as obvious in the days immediately preceding the clash of arms as the historians of the victorious powers so often asserted when it was over. Writing two days after Russia had begun her “partial” mobilization in response to Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia, Lord Bertie, at the time British ambassador in France, wrote in his diary,

It seems incredible that the Russian Government should plunge Europe into war in order to make themselves the protectors of the Servians. Unless the Austrian Government had proofs of the complicity of Servian officials in the plot to murder the Archduke (which they did, ed.) they could not have addressed to the Servian Government the stringent terms which the Austrian Note contained. Russia comes forward as the protectress of Servia; by what title except on the exploded pretension that she is, by right, the protectress of all Slavs? What rubbish! And she will expect, if she adhere to her present attitude, France and England to support her in arms.

A day later he wrote,

I cannot believe in war unless Russia wants it. The Military party in Germany may think the present moment more favourable for Germany than it is likely to be later, when the reforms in the Russian Army will have been carried out and the strategic railways, converging on the Russo-German frontier, will have been constructed, but I cannot think that the German Emperor and his Government desire war. I do not believe that they were accessories before the fact to the terms of the Austrian Note to Servia. If, however, the Emperor of Russia adhere to the absurd and obsolete claim that she is protectress of all Slav States, however bad their conduct, was is probable, Germany will be bound to support Austria, and France will have to help Russia.

In fact, that’s exactly how it looked to Kaiser Wilhelm himself. As he noted in his memoirs, it was clear that if Germany fulfilled her treaty obligations to defend Austria against a Russian attack, it would certainly bring France into the war. The Germans knew they would be facing a two front war, and reacted accordingly. He also confirmed Bertie’s surmise about the conflict between the German civil and military officials in the days leading up to war. In his words,

The foreign office… was so hypnotized by the idea of “peace at any price,” that it completely ruled out war as a possible element of Entente policy, and was therefore unable to correctly assess the signs that war was possible. Therein lies yet another proof of Germany’s desire to preserve the peace. This attitude of the foreign office gave rise to certain contradictions between it and the General Staff and the Admiralty, who gave warning as their duty required, and advised preparations for defense. These difference persisted for some time. The Army could never forget the fact that it was the fault of the foreign office that they had been surprised. And the diplomats were piqued that war had come in spite of their efforts.

The memoirs of the Kaiser and some of the other key players in the war and the events leading up to it are often dismissed with a wave of the hand as mere justifications after the fact. In fact, while self-justification is a typical motive, memoirs can’t simply be invented out of whole cloth, and invariably reveal a great deal about the character of the authors, regardless of how they choose to construe the facts. Wilhelm was no angel. He was paranoid, a narcissist, became an anti-Semite, especially after the war, and had an unfortunate penchant for bombast and bluster. However, he was not the rabid warmonger portrayed by Röhl and many others, either.

Perhaps the most damaging indictment of Germany was written by her ambassador in Great Britain before the war, Prince Karl Lichnowsky. His assessment, currently available under the title, The Guilt of Germany for the War of German Aggression, pointed out the folly of Germany’s crash naval building program in alienating England. He saw the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, as a man dedicated to preserving the peace, and an honest broker in his dealings with Germany and the other European powers. Grey had suggested a conference of the powers, similar to the one that had preserved the peace of Europe during another spat over the Balkans a couple of years earlier, as a way to avoid war. Lichnowsky considered Germany’s decision to refuse this offer suicidal, and a major contributing factor to the onset of war. His assessment of Grey and British policy in general was probably a great deal more accurate than that of the Kaiser and the German foreign office. Their paranoia about the supposed perfidious, anti-German intrigues of England’s King Edward VII and his foreign secretary is evident in the Kaiser’s as well as several other memoirs. However, in spite of that, one cannot simply ignore the reply of von Jagow, German foreign secretary at the time, which is also included in the volume referred to above. According to Jagow,

We could not agree to the English proposal of a conference of Ambassadors, for it would doubtless have led to a serious diplomatic defeat. For Italy, too, (Germany’s ally at the time in the Triple Alliance with Austria, ed.) was pro-Serb and, with her Balkan interests, stood rather opposed to Austria… The best and only feasible way of escape was a localization of the conflict and an understanding between Vienna and Petrograd. We worked toward that end with all our energy.

In retrospect, this “way of escape” may have appeared a great deal more “feasible,” in view of the fact that the actual alternative turned out to be Germany’s crushing defeat in the World War, but that outcome did not yet seem inevitable. In fact, Germany did seek to localize the conflict, as is evident from the source material. As for the German naval building program, I doubt that its aim was really to outstrip or seriously threaten British domination of the seas. Again, one cannot simply dismiss what has been written about the subject on the German side. According to the one man most often associated with the program, Admiral von Tirpitz, Germany’s battle fleet was necessary in order to protect her coast against a combination of France and Russia or any other two naval powers other than Great Britain. She never aimed at more than an 8 to 5 ratio of naval power in favor of England, and would have been satisfied with 3 to 2. There is no credible evidence that Tirpitz or the Kaiser aimed at anything beyond this.

There is a great deal of additional material in Tirpitz’ memoirs of interest to students of events leading up to the outbreak of war. For example, he could not understand why Germany had not simply mobilized in response to the Russian mobilization, and left the moral odium of an actual declaration of war to its enemies. In his words,

Did not (German Chancellor, ed.) Bethmann really consider the enormous disadvantages which were created for us by our not leaving the act of declaration of war to the enemy?… my feelings revolted at our having to assume the odium of the attacking party in the face of the world, on account of the jurists of the Foreign Office, although we could not at all intend to march into Russia, and although we were in reality the attacked party. I therefore asked the Chancellor, as the meeting broke up, why the declaration of war had to coincide with our mobilization? The Chancellor replied that this was necessary because the army would immediately send troops over the frontier. The reply astonished me, because at the most it could only be a question of patrols. But through these days Bethmann was so agitated and overstrained that it was impossible to speak with him. I can still hear him as he repeatedly stressed the absolute necessity of the declaration of war, with his arms uplifted, and consequently cut short all further discussion. When I asked Moltke afterwards the actual relation between the crossing of the frontier and our declaration of war, he denied any intention of sending troops over the frontier forthwith. He also told me that he attached no value to the declaration of war from his own point of view.

Thus the riddle, why we declared war first, remains unsolved for me. It is to be assumed that we did it out of formal legal consciousness. The Russians began the war without any declaration, but we believed that we could not defend ourselves without such a statement. Outside Germany there is no appreciation for such ideas.

That’s for sure! In retrospect, it’s hard to find fault with his reasoning. Unfortunately, I can’t write a complete history of the start of World War I in a blog post. Suffice it to say that I agree with Clark that the notion that it was all Germany’s fault, with Kaiser Wilhelm the “bad guy” extraordinaire, is nonsense. There was plenty of blame to go around. What’s the point? I suppose that I tend to be dubious of the value of morality tales posing as history. In reality, there are no good guys and bad guys. The terms “good” and “bad” are artifacts of the human tendency to attribute objectivity to moral judgments. In fact, they do not exist as things-in-themselves, but are better understood as subjective impressions in the minds of individuals. I read history to gain an understanding of why things happened the way they did, and what motivated individuals to act the way they did. That information is often lost in works that seek to portray certain individuals as “good,” and others as “bad.” Understanding of real human beings and the complexity of human motivations and behavior are sacrificed when one seeks to create a collection of wooden puppets that all fit neatly in one of these two moral pigeonholes.

Of Smug Germans and Sinful Australians: Global Warming Update

No doubt the outcome of the Nazi unpleasantness resulted in attitude adjustment in Germany on a rather large scale. Clearly, however, it didn’t teach the Germans humility. At a time when a secular mutation of Puritanism has become the dominant ideology in much of Europe and North America, the Germans take the cake for pathological piety. Not that long ago the fashionable evil de jour was the United States, and anti-American hate mongering in the German media reached levels that would make your toes curl. In the last years of the Clinton and the first years of the following Bush administrations it was often difficult to find anything about Germany on the home pages of popular German news magazines like Der Spiegel because the available space was taken up by furious rants against the United States for the latest failures to live up to German standards of virtue. Eventually the anti-American jihad choked on its own excess, and other scapegoats were found. Clearly, however, German puritanism is still alive and well. An amusing example just turned up in the Sydney Morning Herald under the headline, “Merkel adviser lashes Abbott’s ‘suicide strategy’ on coal.” The advisor in question was one Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Chancellor Merkel’s lead climate advisor. A picture of him posing as the apotheosis of smugness accompanies the article, according to which he,

…attacked Australia’s complacency on global warming and described the Abbott government’s championing of the coal industry as an economic “suicide strategy”.

Alas, we learn that Schellnhuber’s anathemas also fell on our neighbor to the north. The SMH quotes him as saying,

Similar to Canada, Australia for the time being is not part of the international community which is cooperating to achieve greenhouse gas emission reductions.

Tears run down our cheeks as Schellnhuber describes Australia’s fall from grace:

…it had been disappointing to see Australia’s retreat on climate policy after it became “the darling of the world” when Kevin Rudd ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2007.

As readers who were around at the time may recall, the Kyoto Protocol conformed perfectly to German standards of “fairness.” It would have required states like The United States and Canada to meet exactly the same percentage reduction in emissions from the base year 1990 as the countries in the European Union, in spite of the fact that their economies had expanded at a faster rate than most of Europe’s during the period, they did not enjoy the same access to cheap, clean-burning natural gas as the Europeans in those pre-fracking days, and, “fairest” of all, they weren’t the beneficiaries of massive emission reductions from the closing of obsolete east European factories following the demise of Communism. In other words, it was “fair” for the US and Canada to shed tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs in order to meet grossly disproportionate emissions standards while Germany and the rest of the Europeans cheered from the sidelines.

What is one to think of this latest instance of ostentatious German piety? I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. For one thing, the apparent concern about climate change in Germany is about 99% moralistic posing and 1% real. Solzhenitsyn used a word in The First Circle that describes the phenomenon very well; sharashka. Basically, it’s a lie so big that even those telling it eventually begin to believe it. The German decision to shut down their nuclear power plants demonstrated quite clearly that they’re not serious about fighting global warming. Base load sources of energy are needed for when renewables are unavailable because the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining. Practical alternatives for filling in the gaps include nuclear and fossil fuel. Germany has rejected the former and chosen one of the dirtiest forms of the latter; coal-fired plants using her own sources of lignite. She plans to build no less than 26 of them in the coming years!

It’s stunning, really. These plants will pump millions of tons of CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that wouldn’t have been there if Germany had kept her nuclear plants on line. Not only that, they represent a far greater radioactive danger than nuclear plants, because coal contains several parts per million of radioactive thorium and uranium. The extent of German chutzpah is further demonstrated by a glance at recent emission numbers. Germany is now the worst polluter in the EU. Her CO2 emissions have risen substantially lately, due mainly to those new lignite plants beginning to come on line. Coal-generated energy in Germany is now around 50% of the mix, the highest it’s been since 1990. Even as the German government shook its collective head at the sinful Australians, telling them to mend their evil ways or bear the guilt for wars and revolution, not to mention the bleaching of the coral in the Great Barrier Reef, her own CO2 emission rose 1.5% in 2013 over the previous year, while Australia’s fell by 0.8% in the same period!

In a word, dear reader, for the German “Greens,” the pose is everything, and the reality nothing.

German Media Update: The Honeymoon is Definitely Over

Times have changed in Germany since Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize and spoke before 200,000 enraptured fans in Berlin. Only 6,000 turned out to hear him when he returned last year. Meanwhile, the media there, particularly since the recent events in Ukraine, has been resurrecting themes that were familiar during the Cold War. The political left is beginning to turn to Russia, and the political right is decrying the weakness of the Obama Administration. For example, while the overall tone of the main news magazine, Der Spiegel, has been anti-Russian, Jakob Augstein, whose column “When in Doubt, to the Left,” appears there regularly, wrote a couple of days ago:

Media and political pundits want to breathe new life into an old “face of the enemy” (Feindbild): the evil Russian. As far as Russia is concerned, the West is in once again stuck in the same rut as in the cynical days of yesteryear, when US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger publicly expressed his hope that the superpower in the East would go under “with a whimper, not with a bang.” Hillary Clinton just compared Putin to Hitler. That’s how one recommends oneself in the US as a potential Democratic presidential candidate. Meanwhile, the Russia policy of the two East Germans Merkel and (German President) Gauck is as resentful as if they were exploiting their offices for private trauma therapy.

Meanwhile the polls are showing that the public isn’t inclined to tag along. A majority of Germans do not consider Putin unreasonable for viewing the Crimea as a Russian sphere of influence. (As opposed to Putin) the tendency to ignore and violate borders is a characteristic of the West. It constantly seeks to fish in troubled waters (“periklitieren”), to use one of Bismarck’s favorite expressions, outside of its own sphere of influence. Or, more to the point, it claims the whole world as its sphere of interest. That’s just the problem.

The West can never get enough, and is therefore insatiable… The Asians have finally drawn their own conclusions: the lamb must now itself become the wolf.

It’s clear from the reader comments that appeared after a recent Spiegel article on the crisis that Augstein hasn’t misrepresented German attitudes. The article itself, entitled, “The Ukraine: Obama Expresses Scorn for Ukraine as a Regional Power,” includes the understated byline, “This isn’t how de-escalation should look.” Some typical examples:

The ineffectual US President dares to shoot his mouth off like this? He never seems to come up with anything concrete and positive except stupidities… I demand that his Nobel Peace Prize be revoked. (whiteelephant1)

The US is clearly on the path of escalation… It would be nice if the German media would adopt a more critical attitude, and not always just go along with everything the US/EU says. Putin isn’t the danger. The danger comes from those who now sense an opportunity to finish Russia once and for all. That’s what this is really about. (mc6206)

Very nice, Mr. Obama, just keep playing with fire. After all, thank God there’s a buffer zone between Russia and your homeland in case Russia loses its nerve. It’s called EUROPE! (Korf)

If Russia is just a “regional power,” and one has more important problems to deal with, why these hysterical attempts to isolate Russia and portray her in a bad light. Who is supposed to be swallowing such stupidities from Obama? (itf)

Well, we’re not exactly seeing a return to the last super-eruption of anti-Americanism in Germany that reached its climax about 15 years ago, but the honeymoon is clearly over.

UPDATE: Der Spiegel just published its take on an interview with former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt that appeared in the weekly newspaper, Die Zeit. Schmidt is a highly intelligent man whose memoirs are well worth reading, and who can hardly be described as anti-American. Der Spiegel headlines the interview, “Former Chancellor Schmidt Defends Putin’s Ukraine Policy.” The byline reads, “Helmut Schmidt finds the actions of Russia in the Crimea ‘completely understandable,’ and considers sanctions ‘dumb stuff’ (dummes Zeug). No doubt the situation in Ukraine is dangerous – however, in the former Chancellor’s opinion, the West is at fault.”

A few excerpts from the article in Der Spiegel:

Schmidt was highly critical of the way in which the Crimea crisis has been handled in the West. He referred to the sanctions imposed on Russia by the European Union and the USA as “dumb stuff.” In Schmidt’s opinion, attempts to impose further sanctions would be misguided. For the most part they would have merely symbolic value, “but they would affect the West just as much as the Russians.

Schmidt’s words provide support to those taking part in the debate in Germany who favor looking at things from the Russian point of view. Former Chancellor and party colleague Gerhard Schröder recently spoke in similar terms.

According to Schmidt, the situation in Ukraine is “dangerous, because the West has worked itself into a frenzy.” (literally, “has become terribly excited”) As a result, “the overwrought reaction in the West has naturally led to a similar overwrought reaction in Russian public opinion and politics.” Referring to the (reserved) policy of Chancellor Angela Merkel the 95-year old said, “In this case praise for the caution of the German Chancellor is appropriate.”

So far the editorial narrative at Der Spiegel has been mainly anti-Russian. However, there has been a shift to a more circumspect approach lately, with articles critical of right wing nationalists in the current Kiev regime, taking note of western media darling Yulia Timoshenko’s hateful tirade against Putin in an overheard telephone conversation in which she said she was “ready to pick up a machine pistol and shoot this piece of crap in the head,” suggesting the use of nuclear weapons to kill Russians, and so on. It is noteworthy that the German Green Party, which has tacked to the right in recent years, immediately condemned Schmidt’s comments, while the Party of the Left, positioned to the left of the German Socialist Party (SPD), praised his remarks.

Warmongering at “Der Spiegel?”

Pity the poor President. He can’t do anything right! Or at least not according to Der Spiegel. After furiously condemning him for lethal drone attacks, murdering civilians in Afghanistan, and personally eavesdropping on German phone conversations via a direct line from the NSA, the editors are now upset with his pusillanimous lack of warlike spirit in Syria. In an article on the Spiegel website entitled “Barack Obama’s Syria Policy: President for Procrastination and Delay,” Washington correspondent Sebastian Fischer dolefully informs us that after not one, not two, but three really serious, we mean it this time, warnings from Obama, Assad blew him off and attacked his own people with chemical weapons anyway. Assad “gives a whistle” about US threats. Wringing his hands, Fischer wonders, “How can this be? Is Obama too weak?”

It would seem so, as Fischer continues, “Particularly alarming for Obama: The indifference of the dictator Assad isn’t an anomaly. The US President isn’t getting through to Egypt’s military, either. He can warn and scold as much as he wants, but the new rulers in Cairo pay no attention to him. And what of Russia’s President Putin, the only one who might still have a shot at reigning in Assad? He’s done his best to show how unimpressed he is with America.” Spiegel’s man on the spot goes on to tell us that, “In Washington, this kind of impotence is received with bitterness.” Ending his piece with a bit of humor, Fisher writes, “On Wednesday Obama’s press secretary was asked just where the President’s ‘red line’ was located in the case of Egypt. ‘Well,’ joked Josh Earnest, ‘I didn’t bring along my red pencil.'”

Aficionados of US-German relations will remember wistfully how we were assured at the end of the Bush Administration that the advent of Obama would usher in a golden age in relations between the countries. I can assure the lay reader that the honeymoon has been over for a long time. Readers of German who need a good laugh should look at the comment section after the article. In keeping with the time-honored German tradition when it comes to articles about the US, it contains numerous revelations of various “plots” by our government, many of which are mutually contradictory, yet, we are assured, “proved” by oodles of evidence. In this case, the commenters are as full of novel insights as ever. One HäretikerX assures us that Obama is a “Bush puppet.” Ihawk explains that any intervention in Syria “must and should be under the leadership of Russia,”(!) apparently because Syria belongs to the Russian sphere of influence. Eppelein von Gailengen chimes in, “A toothless tiger has come undone. That’s especially true of Obama and his policy. No bite, no concept of the future, no recovery in the job market as a result of a lack of any economic growth worth mentioning.”

Well, what of it? Should we write off Germany yet again? Far from it, dear reader! Even at the peak of the latest high tide of anti-Americanism in Germany at the end of the Clinton and start of the Bush Administrations, when the media there from right to left was full of furious anti-US propaganda every day, and it was often difficult to find anything on the Der Spiegel website about Germany because of the number of incredibly vile, hatemongering, foaming at the mouth attacks on Amerika, there were always a few decent and honest German bloggers and commenters who defended us. As a good atheist, I can only say, “God bless them!” It seems to me there has always been more of that type in Germany than in any other country, and especially more than in the US. Now there seem to be more of them than ever. Here are some examples from the comment section of Fischer’s article:

From a Spiegel reader on Facebook:

When the US attacks, bad! When the US doesn’t attack, bad! As far as some people are concerned, America can never be in the right, and is always responsible if anyone is killed. What about Europe and its responsibility? Oh, right, European politicians don’t have a clue. Well then.

From eknoes:

According to the comments in forums like this, Obama is a “toothless tiger” if he doesn’t do anything, and “interfering in the internal affairs of other states” if he does. As far as the usual Spiegel commenter is concerned, he can never do anything right.

From Ruhepuls:

When the American’s play “big brother,” and intervene – if necessary with armed force – in some conflict, then they are accused of striving for hegemony (imperialism). But if they stay out of it, then they are accused of failing to use their power to pursue “humanitarian” goals. What the heck! No matter what the Americans do, it’s always wrong!

From omarius:

So this time the Americans are standing aside… and they still can’t please anyone… apparently the professional leftists have discovered a problem that doesn’t have a political solution.^^

…and many more similar entries. Write off the Germans? I don’t think so. Taken one commenter with another, they’re saner than most.

German “Greens” and the Poisoning of Eastern Europe

A while back in an online discussion with a German “Green,” I pointed out that, if Germany shut down its nuclear plants, coal plants would have to remain in operation to take up the slack. He was stunned that I could be so obtuse. Didn’t I realize that the lost nuclear capacity would all be replaced by benign “green” energy technology? Well, it turns out things didn’t quite work out that way. In fact, the lost generating capacity is being replaced by – coal.

Germany is building new coal-fired power plants hand over fist, with 26 of them planned for the immediate future. According to Der Spiegel, the German news magazine that never misses a trick when it comes to bashing nuclear, that’s a feature, not a bug. A recent triumphant headline reads, “Export Boom: German Coal Electricity Floods Europe.” Expect more of the same from the home of Europe’s most pious environmentalists. Germany has also been rapidly expanding its solar and wind capacity recently thanks to heavy state subsidies, but the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine, especially in Germany. Coal plants are required to fill in the gaps – lots of them. Of course, it would be unprofitable to let them sit idle when wind and solar are available, so they are kept going full blast. When the power isn’t needed in Germany, it is sold abroad, serving as a useful prop to Germany’s export fueled economy.

Remember the grotesque self-righteousness of Der Spiegel and the German “Greens” during the Kyoto Treaty debates at the end of the Clinton administration? Complying with the Kyoto provisions cost the Germans nothing. They had just shut down the heavily polluting and grossly unprofitable industries in the former East Germany, had brought large numbers of new gas-fired plants on line thanks to increasing gas supplies from the North Sea fields, and had topped it off with a lame economy in the 90’s compared to the booming U.S. Their greenhouse gas emissions had dropped accordingly. Achieving similar reductions in the U.S. wouldn’t have been a similar “freebie.” It would have cost tens of thousands of jobs. The German “Greens” didn’t have the slightest problem with this. They weren’t interested in achieving a fair agreement that would benefit all. They were only interested in striking pious poses.

Well, guess what? Times have changed. Last year U.S. carbon emissions were at their lowest level since 1994, and down 3.7% from 2011. Our emissions are down 7.7% since 2006, the largest drop among major industrial states on the planet. German emissions were up at least 1.5% last year, and probably more like 2%. Mention this to a German “Green,” and he’s likely to mumble something about Germany still being within the Kyoto limits. That’s quite true. Germany is still riding the shutdown of what news magazine Focus calls “dilapidated, filthy, communist East German industry after the fall of the Berlin Wall,” to maintain the facade of environmental “purity.”

That’s small comfort to her eastern European neighbors. Downwind from Germany’s coal-fired plants, their “benefit” from her “green” policies is acid rain, nitrous oxide laced smog, deadly particulates that kill and sicken thousands and, last but not least, a rich harvest of radioactive fallout. That’s right, Germany didn’t decrease the radioactive hazard to her neighbors by shutting down her nuclear plants. She vastly increased it. Coal contains several parts per million each of radioactive uranium and thorium. These elements are harmless enough – if kept outside the body. The energetic alpha particles they emit are easily stopped by a normal layer of skin. When that happens, they dump the energy they carry in a very short distance, but, since skin is dead, it doesn’t matter. It’s an entirely different matter when they dump those several million electron volts of energy into a living cell – such as a lung cell. Among other things, that can easily derange the reproductive equipment of the cell, causing cancer. How can they reach the lungs? Very easily if the uranium and thorium that emit them are carried in the ash from a coal-fired plant. A typical coal-fired plant releases about 5 tons of uranium and 12 tons of thorium every year. The German “Greens” have no problem with this, even though they’re constantly bitching about the relatively miniscule release of uranium from U.S. depleted uranium munitions. Think scrubber technology helps? Guess again! The uranium and thorium are concentrated in the ash, whether it ends up in the air or not. They can easily leach into surrounding cropland and water supplies.

The last time there was an attempt to move radioactive waste to the Gorleben storage facility within Germany, the “Greens” could be found striking heroic poses as saviors of the environment all along the line, demonstrating, tearing up tracks, and setting police vehicles on fire. Their “heroic” actions forced the shutdown of Germany’s nuclear plants. The “gift” (German for “poison”) of their “heroic” actions to Germany’s neighbors came in the form of acid rain, smog, and airborne radiation. By any reasonable standard, coal-fired plants are vastly more dangerous and damaging to the environment than the nuclear facilities they replaced.

It doesn’t matter to Germany’s “Greens.” The acid rain, the radiation, the danger of global warming they always pretend to be so concerned about? It doesn’t matter. For them, as for the vast majority of other environmental zealots worldwide, the pose is everything. The reality is nothing.

Second Thoughts about Green Energy in Germany

Der Spiegel, Germany’s top news magazine, has been second to none in promoting green energy, striking pious poses over the U.S. failure to jump on the Kyoto bandwagon, and trashing nuclear energy. All this propaganda has succeeded brilliantly. Germany has a powerful Green Party and is a world leader in the production of wind and solar energy, the latter in a cloudy country, the lion’s share of which lies above the 50th parallel of latitude. Now the bill has come due. In 2012 German consumers paid more than 20 billion Euros for green energy that was worth a mere 2.9 billion on the open market. True to form, Der Spiegel has been churning out shrill condemnations of the high prices, as if it never had the slightest thing to do with promoting them in the first place. In an article entitled “Green Energy Costs Consumers More Than Ever Before,” we find, among other things, that,

The cost of renewable energy continues climbing year after year. At the beginning of the year it increased from 3.59 to 5.27 (Euro) cents per kilowatt hour. One of the reasons for the increase is solar energy: more new solar facilities were installed in Germany in 2012 than ever before. The drawback of the solar boom is that it drives up the production costs paid by consumers. The reason – green energy producers will receive guaranteed compensation for every kilowatt hour for the next 20 years.

As a result, German consumers saw their bills for electricity increase by an average of 12% at the beginning of 2013. The comments following the article are at least as revealing as its content. The environmental hubris of the population shows distinct signs of fading when tranlated into terms of cold, hard cash. Examples:

What a laugh! The consumers pay 17 billion Euros, and the producers receive 2.9 billion Euros. Conclusion: End the subsidies for solar facilities immediately!! It’s too bad that the pain of consumers – if the Green Party joins the government after the Bundestag election – won’t end, but will only get worse. Other than that, solar facilities belong in countries with significantly more hours of sunlight than Germany.

Those were the days, when (Green politician) Trittin told shameless lies to the public, claiming that the switch to green energy would only cost 1.5 Euros per household.

In ten years we’ll learn what the green energy lies are really going to cost us.

The real costs are even higher. When there’s no wind, or clouds cut off the sunlight, then the conventional energy sources held in reserve must make up the deficit; the oil, coal and brown coal energy plants. If production costs are calculated correctly, then their expense should be included in the price of green energy. All at once there is a jump from 17 billion to 25 billion Euros in the price we have to pay for the “favors” the Green-Red parties have done us.

Specious arguments about the supposedly comparable costs of the nuclear power plants Germany is in the process of shutting down are no longer swallowed with alacrity. For example, in response to the familiar old chestnut of citing exaggerated costs for decommissioning nuclear plants and storing the waste a commenter replies:

Hmmm, if nuclear energy is so expensive, why are so many countries in central Europe – for example, the Czech Republic – interested in nuclear power? Certainly not to breed actinides to build nuclear weapons in order to become “nuclear powers.” The cost of long term waste storage in terms of the energy produced only amounts to about 0.01 Euros per Kw/h. Even decommissioning expenses don’t add significantly to the overall cost… Let us split atoms, not hairs.

A “green” commenter suggests that the cleanup costs for the Fukushima reactors be automatically added to the cost of all reactors:

According to the latest figures for November 2012 for Fukushima: 100 billion Euros. Distributing this over the total energy production of 880,000 GWh (according to Wikipedia) that’s 11 cents per kilowatt hour. That amounts to twice the “prettified” cost of nuclear power (without insurance and without subsidies) of 5 cents per kilowatt hour. And even then the Japanese were lucky that the wind didn’t shift in the direction of Tokyo. But the 100 billion won’t be the last word.

Drawing the response from another reader:

Let’s see. Japanese nuclear power plants produce 7,656,400 GWh of energy. In comparison to economic costs in the high tens of billions, 100 billion suddenly doesn’t seem so unreasonable. It only adds 1.3 cent per KWh to the cost of nuclear energy. Peanuts. In Germany, renewables are currently costing an average of 18 cents per KWh. That translates to 100 billion in under four years. In other words, thanks to renewables, we have a Fukushima in Germany every four years.

In response to a remark about all the wonderful green jobs created, another commenter responds,

Jobs created? Every job is subsidized to the tune of 40,000 Euros; how, exactly, is that supposed to result in a net gain for the economy overall?? According to your logic, all we have to do to eliminate any level of unemployment is just subsidize it away. That’s Green politics for you.

Another unhappy power customer has noticed that, in addition to the hefty subsidy he’s paying for his own power, he has to finance his well-healed “green” neighbors rooftop solar array as well:

Whoever is surprised about the increases in the cost of electricity hasn’t been paying attention. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. At the moment the consumer is paying for the solar cells on his neighbor’s roof right along with his own electricity bill. Surprising? Who’s surprised?

It’s amazing how effective a substantial and increasing yearly hit to income can be in focusing the mind when it comes to assessing the real cost of green energy.

Category: Germany