Some Germans are off to the (Master) Races

Ricochet.com editor Claire Berlinski thinks it’s time we took the “neo-“ mask off of Germany’s the “neo-nazis”:

Unlike many who are keen to deny the danger of right-wing extremism in Europe, proposing instead that we focus our alarm upon the menace posed to liberal democracy by Islamic extremists, I'm a dual-direction Cassandra. Europe does indeed have a dangerous ultra-right, and by "ultra-right," I do not mean dutiful Anglicans and devout proponents of market deregulation, I mean Nazis. Call them neo-Nazis or new Nazis if you like, but when they start killing immigrants in the name of racial purity, I see no need for that qualifier.

The so-called National Socialist Underground killed nine immigrants (eight of them Turkish, one Greek). They avoided detection for years because the police were looking in the wrong direction.

Having about two years ago on crowded Berlin U-Bahn train heard a loud drunk retort a guy trying to since silence him by yelling out “Heil Hitler!”, I saw that the stigma that I’ve known my whole life for Nazi sayings and symbols, had worn off with a good part of the general population.

She also notes the subtlety with which many Europeans argue. While it isn’t the dark ages, ideological differences and disagreements are quite frequently met with threats of personal violence, as though the ego were more precious that life itself.

especially given that Third Reich imagery and dramaturgy doesn't sound all that innocent. Comments like these--"Claire Berlinski is just a paranoid little Jew"--were among the more printable. In fact, the Nazis sent me more hate mail than the Islamists and the communists.

To note an old joke which I’ve heard used for both Arabs and Israelis: How does a [ _____ ] commit suicide? He jumps from his ego to his IQ. The same seems to be true of those reviving Europe’s native (and nativist) social practices, as a reaction to a complex world that they think is cheating them out of the hopes they had for themselves.

Rammstein’s popularity may have softened German society’s stigma for Nazism, which is likely what they intended by this subculture as the soft beginnings of de-denazification. Either way, it’s a misshapen and simplistic view of the world that’s no better than violent Islamism to which Nazism is historically linked.

It also comes at the worst time in western society: when liberty itself must be defended with broad-mindedness, joie de vivre, strength, but most of all with living examples of liberty’s healthy and robust vision of a good society itself. Neo-nazis wooing the weak-minded and callow have no place in a good society and may be more of an indication to the principles of a good society being neglected.

Of the treatment the issue has been given, Berlinski characterizes it without much doubt:

The word for that is "denial." Men who look like Nazis, call themselves Nazis, blow up Jewish cemeteries and kill Turkish shopkeepers are not little boys playing cowboys and Indians. They're Nazis.

This problem will get worse.

Just where does all of this fall on a scale? Well, not so fast, there cowboy – it’s really doesn’t, not when you listen carefully past what a PC Gutmensch says, and get at what they worry about. The oddly bespeckled smart-asses of politically correct pleasantries are not that different than these Nazis when you take their stridency, narrowness, and simplistic view of civilization into account. It’s even hard to say that they are the opposite sides of the same coin.