Move Along. Nothing Left to See Here.

Paul Belein:

Last year more than 155,000 Germans emigrated from their native country. Since 2004 the number of ethnic Germans who leave each year is greater than the number of immigrants moving in. While the emigrants are highly motivated and well educated, "those coming in are mostly poor, untrained and hardly educated," says Stephanie Wahl of the German Institute for Economics.

In a survey conducted in 2005 among German university students, 52 percent said they would rather leave their native country than remain there. By "voting with their feet," young, educated Germans affirm that Germany has no future to offer them and their children. As one couple who moved to the United States told the newspaper Die Welt: "Here our children have a future in which they will not have to fear unemployment and social decline."

More numerically staggering is that emigration is exceeding immigration in the Netherlands, and at a rate of 130.000 in 2006, eclipsing Germany’s loss by a factor of four. But to the point of interest to the American social conversation, the image of the European social idyll pitched by the supposedly urbane press needs to be tempered with a basic and rational observation of that flight:

Americans who think that the European welfare state is the model to follow would do well to ponder the question why, if Europe is so wonderful, Europeans are fleeing from it.

Belein describes some curious milestones that the wizened sooths of Old Europe’s™ national governments don’t care to call attention to: emigration peaked after the murder of Pim Fortyn and Theo van Gogh. For many, these events appear to be too much – a sort of tipping point or ”emotionally significant” number which the press reserves for issues they themselves seem better psychologically prepared to countenance.



The “other white meat” – social mass suicide.

Let’s not forget about the most noticeable feature scaring people with personal potential and families away: the social medium dominated by the predilections of many of the “aboriginals” themselves:

With the international media focused on the violent clashes between left-wing "anti-globalization" activists and German police at the anti-G-8 protest in Rostock this past weekend, another component of Germany's broad "anti-globalization" consensus will have passed largely unperceived: namely, the neo-Nazis of the National-Democratic Party of Germany or NPD. Under the motto "There is no such thing as fair globalization," an NPD-sponsored anti-G-8 demonstration had been scheduled to take place in the nearby city of Schwerin on Saturday, the same day as the "leftist" demonstration in Rostock. The NPD protest was, however, cancelled at the last minute, as the state supreme court of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, citing the potential for violence, upheld a ban issued by the local authorities. In light of the entirely predictable rioting of the leftist "Black Block" in Rostock -- leading to the violence that left nearly 1000 injured, including some 433 police officers -- the court's grounds, it must be said, now seem rather feeble.

In spite of the ban, over 1,500 NPD members are reported to have taken part in smaller, "spontaneous" anti-G-8 protests in several German cities. Over 100 are reported to have marched through Berlin's central Brandenburg Gate. As documented on the NPD Web site -- but virtually ignored by not only the international, but also the German media -- some 50 NPD members, including three members of the regional parliament of Saxony, managed briefly to occupy the steps of the German Reichstag, unfurling anti-G-8 banners and waving NPD flags. "Under the gable of the western entrance to the Reichstag building with its inscription 'To the German People',"

Much in the way Ausländern can’t quite understand how virtually the entire political spectrum in Europe tends to find quiet comfort in totalitarianism-light, they at least wonder about it out loud.

For the NPD, the anti-globalization movement is to be understood as part of a "völkisch" uprising of the world's "peoples" [Völker] against the "rootless" capitalism system. [The German word völkisch is derived from the word Volk: which can be rendered as either "people" or "nation," but unlike the corresponding English words, typically carries a strong connotation of ethnicity. The ethnic idea of the "Volk" or nation was the core idea of the National Socialism of the 1930s and 40s

Oddly enough Nazi writer Joachim Fest said what seems to remain a truth of left dominated societies, both by omission and commission:

“The media fabricates more than two thirds of public opinion from which the foam of the parliamentary Aphrodite rises.”

- El Gato has more.