I think it was Adam Smith who said: “There is much ruin in a nation.” What he meant was that a nation’s downward decline from prosperity to ruin can take some considerable time — nearly five hundred years, in the case of ancient Rome — because all the foundations of that prosperity and the institutions which maintained it may have inherent strength; and decay, while apparently certain, can still be resisted or even held back and improved by the efforts of the nation’s people.
None of which applies, of course, when the nation’s institutions are actively destroyed or its policies undermine its very foundations.
Which leads me to Germany, which is doing both by not taking the Greens out and standing them in front of the machine-gun pits. (Okay, maybe that metaphor could be interpreted as a little too strong, given Germany’s not-so-distant use of said pits, but you know what I mean.)
I suspect that you’ll change your opinion on that metaphor when you read this article:
In response to the intensifying European energy crisis, the green lobby in Brussels and Berlin is accelerating the pace of transformation. Politics lacks the imagination for a real energy crisis scenario. Civil society submits, nearly paralyzed, to its fate.
Anyone who expected that empty gas storage in Germany and the escalating energy crisis in Iran would silence the green lobby in the country must think again. The political representation and its media apparatus — the extended arm of the green crony system — fight with all means to preserve the green transformation complex, regardless of the force with which the waves of reality now crash against the thin green dam.
While economists and business associations worldwide foresee a new energy price shock — with the potential to derail the global economy — solutions to the mercantile bottleneck at Hormuz barely emerge from Berlin’s intellectual narrowness.
On the contrary: On this side of ideologically dismantled infantilism, political elites focus primarily on the survival of their power construct — the Green Deal.
As the saying goes: even civilized societies are always only two missed meals away from chaos. And energy — a steady, secure, and affordable stream of this life force — is the very foundation of what we call civilization.
Stepping back to illustrate the societal phenomenon: under the Green Deal, a highly complex web of politically proliferating environmentalism has emerged — a highly opaque yet extremely effective redistribution machine. Supported by decades of cultivated green moralism, widely accepted in the population — or at least hardly questioned until now.
In this way, an extraction mechanism has emerged that systematically siphons wealth from the productive machinery of society. This wealth is channeled precisely into the green parasitic system, which can proliferate in the shadow of political programs and moral justification without facing significant resistance.
Over time, a state within the state has emerged, its structures deeply grown into economic and institutional fabrics. This entity now seems to be entering a new phase — one of exponential weakening of its host body. Rising energy prices, which over the long term translate into higher inflation rates, are a symptom of the host’s weakening.
I apologize for the lengthy excerpts, but as I read the article, I couldn’t help thinking, “There but for the grace of Donald Trump goes America.”
But more to the point: if we fail to see that the Green Catastrophe will, if we allow it to, become as much a part of our polity as it is in Europe. Hell, thanks to the Obama Dozen Years it nearly did, and it’s taking a Herculean effort by the Trump Administration to undo and untangle us from that strangling creeper.
Suicide may be woven into the Western European polity; but I’m sure as hell hoping that it’s not in ours.