Close window | View original article
In 376 AD, a refugee crisis racked the Roman Empire. Fleeing ravaging Huns, Goths and their families gathered at the Rhine River, the recognized boundary of the Roman Empire for centuries.
For centuries also, Rome had welcomed immigrants, figuring the additional bodies would build its economy and staff its army. As the most successful empire in all of history to that time, the Roman government had every reason for confidence in the wisdom of this policy and no reason to think this time would be any different.
Unfortunately, it was - not because the Goths intended treachery, or because they were absolutely incompatible with Roman ways, but simply because there were too many of them for Rome to absorb as rapidly as they had been absorbed in the past. The hordes which crossed the river exceeded the capacity of the Roman infrastructure to feed, so naturally they started raiding local towns and farms to keep from starvation.
As you'd expect, the Emperor sent an army to restore order and protect his citizens. Unfortunately, by the time they arrived, there were too many Goths, and the Roman army was annihilated in the Battle of Adrianople. The Emperor himself was killed, the might of Rome was broken, and a half-century later the western Roman Empire was a thing of the past.
The left would have us learn that this disaster was caused by not being sufficiently kind to the illegal immigrants. Past a certain point, though, it's not physically possible to be as "kind" to hungry hordes as might be wished, even if you want to.
What, exactly, is that point? Fortunately, whatever it might be, America does not seem to have reached it yet. Our immigration problems could be easily solved by, first, a wall to stop any more illegals from entering, and second, a revival of the principles of the "melting pot" whereby anyone is welcome in America if, and only if, they are willing to become culturally an American in all respects.
Germany, the source of the Goths which ultimately took down Rome, does not seem to have learned the lesson from their own millennia-old victory.
Angela Merkel has delivered a staunch defence of her open-door policy towards refugees, insisting she feels no guilt over a series of violent attacks in Germany and was right to allow hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees to arrive last summer.
“A rejection of the humanitarian stance we took could have led to even worse consequences,” the German chancellor said, adding that the assailants “wanted to undermine our sense of community, our openness and our willingness to help people in need. We firmly reject this.”
This sounds very hospitable and humane. The reality is somewhat different:
Within the space of a week, Germany has been rocked by an axe attack on a train, a mass shooting in Munich that left nine dead, a machete attack in which a pregnant woman was killed and a suicide bomb in Ansbach.
Three of the attacks were carried out by refugees, and two of them – the axe attack in Würzburg in which four people were injured, and the suicide bombing in Ansbach – are believed to have an extremist motive.
The teenager who carried out the Munich shooting, meanwhile, was a German-Iranian who prided himself on sharing a birthday with Adolf Hitler and appeared to have targeted foreigners.
And that's just the new events that the media couldn't help but report. Last New Year's Eve, hundreds of German women were assaulted and raped in city centers all over Germany by rampaging Muslim barbarians while police stood idly by, and the mainstream media refused to report the events until social media basically burned down in righteous fury from the citizenry.
Germans are understandably angry that they seem to be losing their country. Yet their establishment leadership don't appear to care about the damage. In any sane country, any leader who permitted these invasions would resign immediately or be howled from office with an angry mob on her heels. Instead, Ms. Merkel is preparing to run for re-election.
How could she be so arrogant? Well, how could our own establishment here in America be so blind as to not notice the fury of flyover America that led to the anointed standard-bearer of the left being actually defeated?
It isn't hard, really, when your only input is from your fellow-elites who see things exactly the same as you do and nobody in the mainstream media criticize anything you do. Far from learning the proper lesson of Brexit and Mr. Trump - normal people like their countries pretty much the way they are, thank you very much. They do not appreciate elites importing vast numbers of very foreign and ill-behaved people to ruin neighborhoods, commit crimes and absorb expensive government services - many media members are instead anointing Ms. Merkel as the new "Leader of the Free World" because she refuses to limit dangerous illegal immigration in her own country.
Only a uniquely self-confident person can put up with the sort of abuse regularly thrown at conservatives without moderating their stance. Mike Pence is such a man; Donald Trump seems to be mostly so, though he can't resist fighting back with similar ire.
Ms. Merkel, as an open-borders advocate, has no such problem. She can count on the full-throated support of her local media as well as the international press.
The question is - are German voters buying it anymore? Our media though the low-information voters would sheepishly sleepwalk to the polls and vote for Hillary, but Americans turned out to be smarter than expected.
The German political system works differently than ours, but the trends are interesting. In the most recent regional elections, Ms. Merkel's party was bested by "rightwing populists" who have been excluded from the traditional political system. Her own popularity is at five-year lows, and the anti-immigration Alternativ fur Deutschland (AfD) is polling at record highs. Perhaps the fact that one third of Germans feel like strangers in their own country will have a salutary effect in the polls.
Here in America, Donald Trump's stunning victory is being painted as a revolution. In the sense of overturning the established order, it's potentially all of that, but really it's more of a restoration of previous American values. What is there proposed by Donald Trump that Teddy Roosevelt would not recognize and endorse - or, for that matter, Franklin Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy?
And Germany does not even have the same tradition of immigration as the United States. Until the Second World War, Germany had the occasional immigrant from neighboring European countries, and basically nobody else. Since the war, a large contingent of Muslim Turks were brought in to staff growing factories; they have not been well received nor well integrated, and the German people have expressed their preference that there not be any more.
Indeed, even while refusing to stop illegal immigration, Ms. Merkel has been negotiating with Turkey to keep its own people at home. Those are contradictory goals, but the media never calls her out on it any more than they do our own Democrats.
The Roman Emperor Valens badly botched his immigration crisis, and his empire vanished into history as a result. This was incompetence at worst, but it certainly wasn't his goal.
What sort of shocked horror would Valens show, if he could hear our modern liberals celebrating the prospect of Americans and Germans becoming minorities in their own countries? And he'd pass out in a dead faint when he heard that our elites can't even understand why ordinary people are irritated with them.
Yes, as Donald Trump and AfD promise, we need to expel the barbarians. But we also need to urgently do something about the traitors who let them in, starting with permanently removing them from power. Americans have taken the first step in this direction; let's see if the Germans can as well.