By Victor Davis Hanson
Today I’d like to talk about the crisis facing Europe, specifically its self-implosion across the spectrum—energy, population, fertility, defense. Germany, for example, has been systematically shutting down its nuclear plants and, for a while, its natural gas electrical generation plants.
It’s relying, believe it or not, more on oil and coal. But the net result of all of this deliberate turn to wind and solar, at the expense of fossil fuels and nuclear, is that it costs about four times more to use electricity in Germany than it does on average throughout the United States. That’s not the only problem.
Germany is deindustrializing. And by that I mean it’s losing about 200,000 jobs in its auto industry due to these high energy prices and regulations. Its green mandates, especially electric vehicle mandates, have revolutionized the car industry, in the sense that they’re not selling abroad as they did in the past.
In addition to that, Germany’s disarmed. They only have about 125 attack aircraft. They have very few armored vehicles. Their active military is only about 180,000 soldiers.
They have 84 million people in the country. The fertility rate is getting very close to 1.4. I know we have problems here in the United States at 1.6, but 1.4.
And they don’t have borders. They have had a million to 2 million illegal aliens just prance into Germany, especially during the last years of the Merkel chancellorship. In terms of percentage of foreign-born, Germany has more foreign-born than does the United States, which doesn’t have a border in the south, at least until Donald Trump comes in. Twenty percent of the German population is foreign-born.
Why am I mentioning all of this? Because Germany represents the powerhouse, traditionally, of the European economy, and even culture, and it’s starting to implode. The euro, the benchmark of European financial health, is about, right now as I speak at the end of December, one dollar to one euro, and sometimes even less for the euro.
That’s very strange because when I used to run a travel company to go to Europe—I remember in 2008, the euro was 1.6, almost 1.7 per the dollar. So what’s happening is that Germany is, I guess we would call it, undertaking a slow-motion suicide.
But here’s the irony. In September 1944, at the height of World War II, the secretary of the treasury under the Roosevelt administration, Henry Morgenthau, had a plan for postwar Germany when it was defeated.
He didn’t want another war—the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, World War I, World War II. He said, “Enough.” So what did he do? He submitted a plan that was going to deindustrialize Germany, depopulate Germany, change its borders. It was almost as if he was trying to turn it into something like Tacitus’ description of first-century A.D. Germany, as a pastoral, agrarian society. In fact, he explicitly said that.
When Joseph Goebbels heard about this, he said, “Oh my God, this is a gift. We’re losing the war. We’ll tell all of the German people they want us to be permanently pastoral. We’ll starve to death. And even if they don’t like the Nazis, as we’ve destroyed the country, you’re losing more, they’ll fight.”
Thankfully, George Marshall, chief of staff of the Army; ex-President Herbert Hoover; and others went to the Roosevelt administration and said, “If you institute this plan, they’re going to fight to the death. And we have bombed Germany. So when we get into Germany, you’ll see that it’s almost depopulated now.”
The net result was they canceled the Morgenthau Plan that would have permanently made Germany depopulated, disarmed, deindustrialized.
What’s my point in bringing up this historical example? We the victors of World War II thought imposing a plan of deliberate deindustrialization, depopulization, disarmament, open borders, destroyed borders would be too Carthaginian, and so we backed off. And now we’re here 80 years after the rejection of the Morgenthau Plan and the German people, or the German leadership, have essentially updated it and inflicted it on themselves willingly, not by coercion. That’s a tragic irony and it’s something we should all take a very close look at.
First published in the Daily Signal
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One Response
The real irony is how “progressive” politics leads directly to societal regression and even collapse.
Germany’s deindustrialization is due entirely to it’s super-progressive political class who, in the face of their own Trumpian revolution, are grimly determined to thwart common sense, even if that means dumping core democratic principles right up to banning legitimate political opposition parties. The reason for this urge to be “more progressive than the US” is that Germany has been a poodle of the US since 1945. For any local politician to speak common sense about what was in Germany’s own interest has been a career-ending act for more than 70 years; instant smearing as an “anti-democrat” together with the “Nazi/fascist” label awaited such people. The correct position – supporting “democracy” – meant always supporting American policy.
This explains why the “German government” (still under Merkel then) went along with US neocon provocations of Russia in Ukraine from 2012 until war inevitably broke out in 2022. And just like the US, Germany – even as its economy was contracting – poured vast amounts of money it did not have into the black hole of the war in Ukraine. They announced that Germany would stop buying Russian oil. And when both Biden and Nuland publicly announced the impending destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline supplying Germany with Russian gas, the same German political class remained silent. The pipeline was duly blown up several months later. It’s an open secret that the US was responsible. Yet there was not a whimper from the poodle: Germany’s elites meekly accepted the vanishing of their primary source of energy, and SPD and Green Party leaders signed up to the various preposterous theories about who might have been responsible for the Nord Stream pipeline. The utter folly of it all defies belief.
Of course, as has oft been stated, you can ignore reality but you cannot ignore its consequences. And so we have arrived at the updated version of the Morgenthau Plan related by Mr Hanson. Many Americans now point out that the Biden/Harris administration was on course to usher in similar economic collapse in the US, but that this fate has been avoided by the election of Trump. They ought not to be so smug. Much damage has been done. And while so many high-profile public officials in the US (think creatures like Samantha Power & Hillary Clinton) have enriched themselves this past decade via the USAID and other scams, the good old US of A has not done too badly in the deindustrialization stakes at all.