Conservative populists who follow Europe’s creeping left-wing authoritarianism will be delighted with the news of Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) winning second place in Germany’s recent federal election. The party, which took twice the votes (20.8 percent) it earned just four years ago, was essentially born out of former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s astonishing 2015 decision to unilaterally welcome in a million, mostly young and male, economic migrants from the culturally incongruent nations of Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. It now looks to be on track to win a whopping majority in the country’s next federal elections.
To help explain their success, here is AfD’s Beatrix von Storch on German TV recently: “We have two gang rapes a day, we have ten normal rapes a day and we have had 131 violent crimes a day on average over the last six years—by immigrants, primarily Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis.”
Interestingly, there is a book which predicted last Sunday’s results down to a tee. In the 2018 satirical novel The Hungry and the Fat, author Timur Vermes charts the rise of AfD together with yet another Merkel-esque mass march on Germany from the Third World; this one coming from the bowels of sub-Saharan Africa, not the Middle East. As footage starts airing of a 150,000-strong convoy snaking it way towards Germany’s borders, national voter-support for AfD leaps to 20 percent and mass protests erupt across the country.
Although unintentional at first, the instigator of the march is a TV broadcaster that traffics in manipulatively scripted “reality” shows about refugees in Germany. When it takes its format on the road to the world’s largest refugee camp, based in Africa, things turn serious when its host, a fashion model-turned-hack TV journalist, Nadeche Hackenbusch, goes ‘full Merkel’ and sets up the refugee caravan (with the help of criminal smugglers) to the German ‘promised land.’
The nit-witted Hackenbusch, who disrupts every sentence with “like”, but is referred to as “Malaika” or ‘angel’ in Swahili by camp residents, epitomizes the social-media generation of today: a cohort of young people completely lacking in deep knowledge and perspective of the world, while desperately trying to find a vehicle to exercise their own self-absorption and extreme narcissism.
Consumed by a mixture of blown-out ego and misspent empathy, Vermes sets up Hackenbusch as a modern-day Mrs. Jellyby, the infamous character from Dickens’s Bleak House who spends so much time pursuing African philanthropy she neglects the health of her own children. Similarly, Hackenbusch abandons her own children to their stepfather back in Germany (one of them comically named “Bonno” for having been conceived in Bonn à las Victoria Beckham and her daughter “Brooklyn”). This is done so she can lead the convoy with a new refugee lover, someone she cringingly tells is, unlike European men, “a man and a human” who can provide her with “a better love for a better world.”
Of camp residents themselves, we learn, as one reporter for the TV company puts it, “… many of these refugees weren’t refugees… [s]ome even had proper jobs… [something] not obvious to people who don’t know any better.” But what’s important for the broadcaster is the pre-conceived narrative, not the reality. Elsewhere, Vermes has the show’s producer angrily rejecting interview candidates for the show because they are either too cheerful, wear garish jewelry, or have beards (“As soon as your average housewife switches on, she’ll be saying, “Hey, look at Nadeche Hackenbusch! Is she casting terrorists now?”).
After the caravan kicks off and the show’s handlers go along with Hackenbusch’s crusade (“We’re broadcasting the greatest live drama in the history of German television!”), they struggle with managing on-the-ground realities, like the number of pregnancies that happen along the way, many, involving young girls and prostitutes.
Then there’s the aesthetically problematic issue of capturing “shit heaps” on camera. ‘Like a hiker’, one cameraman explains to the irate producer, ‘you can find a suitable stop, if it’s just you… but with a giant mass of people, it gets harder and harder the farther down the moving train you go.’
Rounding all this out is Vermes’s portrayal of Germany’s utterly spineless and spiritually dead political elite. Central here is Interior Minister for the governing center-right party, Joseph Leubl. Similar to American neocons, the 77-year-old Leubl came out of a generation of 1960s social radicals (referred to today in Germany as the “68ers”) who then turned to economic liberalism then called himself a conservative. Comically, when his granddaughter is asked who she would vote for in the next election, she answers: “AfD”—Last Sunday’s election showed the AfD topping youth-vote figures.
Unsurprisingly, Leubl and his team of staff and fellow ministers are at a complete loss as to how to respond to the looming onslaught, and Verme’s portrayal of such hand-wringing is the most important part of the novel. As one jokes: “Maybe we’ll get lucky and the Russians will attack us… We’ll be East Germany all over again, and then we’ll see how many refugees actually want to come.” While it’s true the German nation has become a victim of its own prosperity’s magnetic effects, there is the decadent, magical thinking that has accompanied it which is also to blame.
With the convoy being allowed to march through Turkey towards Germany unabated (taking thousands more refugees with them along the way), one minister states that next-door Bulgaria won’t similarly waver, if German seriously demonstrates it will seal its borders; the thinking being that if eastward neighbors Austria, Hungary and Serbia follow suit in order to keep the German-bound refugees from stopping within their borders, Bulgaria will have to as well. Defending his position, he tells a colleague: “Germany may be stupid and rich, but it’s not defenceless.” To which his colleague responds, “Do you really believe that?” Unfortunately, his answer disappoints.
In an interview, Leubl absurdly claims that any rigorous enforcement of Germany’s post-2015 refugee-limits in this situation will necessarily lead to mass killing. As a solution then, he suggests simply putting aside these legal limits and instead creating a pie-in-the-sky, 50 billion-euro-a-year “integration industry”, so that “newcomers” will be able to contribute to the economy and become good productive Germans. When pressed by the interviewer that such a program, even if financially feasible, would only lead to more armless invaders, he eerily answers in the affirmative, before concluding that ‘if a Nazi wants to complain, they will be banned from employment.’
Vermes does give voice to reason in places. When the producer’s assistant suggests showing to viewers “the other side” of the issue, such as AfD-supporters, she’s met with a gasp before responding, “They’re not all Nazis”—to which the preening TV staff just laugh. Elsewhere, when one government functionary makes his case for fencing off key parts of the border, he states: “Every kilometre of fence means one hundred fewer demonstrators’; something that would be so nice for those on the left constantly fearmongering about ‘the rise of fascism’ to understand.
The core problem presented in the book applies not just to Germany, but to all Western powers as well: do they still have enough pride in their past, a sense of their national self, and a commitment to future generations to see and fight existential threats like globalist moral blackmail and Third World armless invasions? For Germany at least, the book’s explosive ending gives an ambiguous answer: ‘yes’ and ‘no.’
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-book-that-predicted-the-rise-of-germanys-populist-right/