The Hinge of History

German chancellor Angela Merkel's 2015 decision to invite a million marching Muslim men into the EU was the key unforced error of the last decade.

The hinge of recent history was German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision in the late summer of 2015 to let a vast horde of Muslim men into Europe, as Merkel herself admits in the second paragraph of her new memoir Freedom:

… For a long time I couldn't imagine writing such a book. That first changed in 2015, at least a little. Back then, in the night between September 4 and 5, I had decided not to turn away the refugees coming from Hungary at the German-Austrian border. I experienced that decision, and above all its consequences, as a caesura in my chancellorship. There was a before and an after. That was when I undertook to describe, one day when I was no longer chancellor, the sequence of events, the reasons for my decision, my understanding of Europe and globalization bound up with it, in a form that only a book would make possible. I didn't want to leave the further description and interpretation just to other people.

This was such an unforced error that it shocked even me, who had been publicly anticipating something along these lines for some time. It was the mask-off moment when the leadership’s attitude toward their peoples became explicit.

From the Washington Post’s review of Angela Merkel’s new memoir Freedom:

Angela Merkel makes her case in ‘Freedom’

The former German chancellor’s memoir recounts her early life and defends her 16 years leading the country

Review by Liana Fix
November 29, 2024 at 1:57 p.m. EST

… During Trump’s first term, Merkel was hailed by many as the rightful leader of the free world. Now, there is no one to call in Berlin. By all accounts, her legacy should appear stronger than ever. …

Instead, her reputation has taken a serious hit since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Inertia and mistakes, rather than stability and prosperity, now seem to mark her 16-year tenure as chancellor. She deepened Germany’s economic dependency on China and its energy dependency on Russia while abandoning nuclear power; she underinvested in German security and defense; she delayed long-overdue domestic reforms and investments in areas such as education and infrastructure; and her migration policy sowed the seeds for the success of the right-wing extremist party Alternative for Germany. …

But it was the migration crisis of 2015 that Merkel perceives as such a “caesura” in her chancellorship that she divides her tenure into the period before Sept. 4, 2015 — the day she made the decision not to close the German border and to let refugees, mostly Syrians, into the country — and the period after. She stresses the central role that humanism and empathy played in her decision, but also says her policies provided “fresh impetus” for the rise of Alternative for Germany, which transformed from a fringe Euroskeptic party into the extremist anti-migrant behemoth it is today. Her approach to migration policy now seems so untenable that every German political party has moved to the right of her views.

It remains respectable to say that the problem with Merkel’s mistake was that it caused a political backlash, but it’s not respectable to say it was intrinsically a terrible idea.

That includes the CDU, though Merkel’s refusal to cooperate with Alternative for Germany in any way is a “firewall” that holds for the party to this day. …

But between the lines, the other side of Merkel’s legacy shines through: Her sober, pragmatic and cautiously hopeful approach to life and politics is sorely needed these days. … Or her reflections on her famous words in the refugee crisis: “We can do this.” She writes that “no phrase has been thrown back at me with quite such virulence,” but that it “expressed a determination to solve problems, to deal with setbacks, get over the lows and come up with new ideas. … That was how I did politics. It’s how I live.”

Whether or not Germany could do this (let in a million marching Muslim men), the more fundamental question was always whether Germany should do this.

Although her decision was popular among elites in most of Europe and America at the time, I immediately registered my doubts about Merkel’s boner (a reference to Merkle’s boner, a notorious bad play during the 1908 baseball season):

Questions About the Hegira to Germany

Steve Sailer

September 09, 2015

Source: Shutterstock

The German chancellor is being celebrated for finally redeeming her subjects’ innate Nazi bloodguilt by inviting into the European Union huge columns of helpless Syrian refugees.

Or at least that’s what you are supposed to think, just as you were supposed to assume the innocence of Michael Brown and the guilt of Haven Monahan.

On the other hand, you may have some questions. Such as, if these are civilian war refugees, where are all the women, children, and elderly? Why are the incoming masses instead so heavily made up of young louts with smartphones? …

When Jean Raspail prophesied a million migrants invading Europe in his 1973 novel, The Camp of the Saints, he assumed they’d be pitifully malnourished Calcuttans. So why do the colonizers showing up in Europe in 2015 seem generally to be less your tired, your poor, your huddled masses than your strapping fellows, such as the narcissistic bodybuilder on Finnish TV? This refugee documented his trek across the weight rooms and swimming pools of Europe on his Facebook account, and then memorably assured the prime minister of Finland, “I look big, but I’m 17.”

And how old are these “children?” The Sweden Report put together a compilation of pictures that have appeared in the credulous Swedish press of purported 14-year-old refugees, including one official adolescent who could be played well on television by 54-year-old comedian Tim Meadows.

Why does this reverse Volkerwanderung seem to be driven less by hopelessness and more by wanderlust for welfare, work (off the tax rolls, no doubt), and women (especially blondes)? Are these 800,000 that Germany expects (but wants to palm many off on the rest of Europe) just the forerunners of large extended families?

Did the Wanderings of the Peoples, a process precipitated when the ill-fated Emperor Valens invited the Hun-harassed German barbarians to cross the Danube in 376 A.D. in order to refill his treasury with their tax payments, work out well for the Roman Empire?

Is it a tradition for Muslim settlers to trek en masse like this to a welcoming destination? In fact, it’s the oldest Muslim tradition. Year one of the Muslim calendar is set to the hegira of 622 A.D., in which Muhammad encouraged his followers to emigrate in small groups from unfriendly Mecca to trusting Medina.

And is it really good for the Jews of Europe for Berlin to pay for vast numbers of anti-Semitic Muslim youths to colonize the Continent? How did the hegira work out for the Jews of Medina? (That’s a rhetorical question: The Prophet eventually had 700 Medina Jews executed.)

If Muslim mass migration is so good for the Jews, why did the Jewish state respond to the triumph of the migrants by starting construction of Israel’s last border fence the next morning? (Israel, of course, has not offered to take any Syrians, especially not to resettle them in its underpopulated Golan Heights, which the international community legally considers to still be Syrian territory.)

How many Syrians are coming from peaceful refuges in Turkey and Lebanon?

And are these guys really all Syrians? Or are many opportunists from other Muslim countries getting in on the action? Are we witnessing a massive exercise in identity fraud? The Sidney Morning Herald reports that the ground in Serbia just outside the EU/Hungarian border is littered with discarded identity cards from peaceful Muslim countries, such as Pakistan and Kosovo.

Why is it that when Viktor Orban of Hungary tried to defend the European Union as a whole from the onslaught from other continents, he was denounced as a vicious, divisive anti-European nationalist (and no doubt outright Nazi Hun), but when Angela Merkel opportunistically trashed by German fiat the EU consensus against mass importation of Muslim youths, she was hailed as a great European?

In the era of the smartphone, how does it make sense to continue to run a refugee program based on people showing up in person? Shouldn’t asylum seekers apply online?

Why can’t Persian Gulf petro-states take in their fellow Arabs (for example, Qatar is spending $200 billion to spruce itself up for hosting the 2022 World Cup)? Because Gulf insiders have no intention of letting a bunch of fractious and violent Syrians into their country.

By the way, when does the world run out of migrants who are less rich than Europeans? How does Merkel setting the precedent that any lively lad who shows up on the EU’s turf claiming to be a refugee deserves asylum play out in the long run?

To find out, I downloaded the 2015 IMF estimates for the population and GDP per capita of all the countries in the world. It turns out that 5,545,000,000 people live in countries poorer on average than Mexico, Lebanon, or Turkey. That’s a lot.

And don’t forget that Puerto Rico is richer than Portugal, Greece, or the homes to 6.1 billion other people. Yet, enjoying open borders with the U.S., Puerto Rico is currently emptying out into Florida.

Granted, some people in the world are still too poor to migrate. For example, almost a billion people live in countries with lower GDPs than Honduras. Many of them can’t afford the smugglers’ fees, smartphones, and stylish sportswear that appear de rigueur for this season’s desperate asylum seekers. But you’ll recall that even Honduras could afford to send us so many “unaccompanied minors” last year when the Obama administration recruited future Democrats in Central America.

So these numbers would suggest that the population of the countries that are in the prime emigrating income range — not too rich and not too poor — is around 4 or 5 billion.

Indeed, Gallup polling in 151 countries came up with an estimate that 640 million adults would like to emigrate. That’s not counting their children or their dependent seniors, so you could call the real number a billion plus. The United States is the first choice of 150 million of this potential swarm, while 45 million would most like to go to Britain and 26 million to Germany.

Does the TV footage of German women excitedly waving hello to the swaggering Muslim newcomers remind you of the tragic stories of German women waving goodbye to their own menfolk in 1914? Will European self-respect ever recover from the self-inflicted disasters of 1914-1945?

But if Europeans are too sensitive to overcome their feelings of hereditary guilt, can they avoid coming under the domination of more self-confident and less conscience-ridden men from other continents? If indigenous conservative loyalists are shouted into silence as guilty by blood, how can the Social Justice left not ultimately wind up the prey of far more primitive rightists from Iron Age cultures?

As Pat Buchanan observed this month, the events in Europe remind him of James Burnham’s 1964 observation: “Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide.”