Mainz, Germany
Mainz, Germanyצילום: ISTOCK

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz is being savaged by progressive pundits for having stated that "Austria will not accept any further Afghan refugees". Meanwhile, in Germany, progressive candidates outbid each other to see who proposes the highest number of Afghan refugees the European Union should accept. In this charade they have been joined by Luxemburg's "immigration minister" Jean Asselborn, who has rebuked Kurz for his words and invited hundreds of thousands of Afghans to apply for asylum in the EU.

Sebastian Kurz certainly won't turn down gays and adulteresses hounded by the Taliban. Yet the statements of progressives are foolish beyond belief. When a dimwit and serial plagiarist like the German Green Party leader Annalena Baerbock offers 200,000 Afghans asylum in Europe, what she actually does is set in motion a tsunami of millions of Afghans vying to be the first 200,000 refugees the EU accepts.

The experience of 2015 should have demonstrated beyond any doubt that as soon as political leaders utter silly slogans like Ms. Merkel did while inviting refugees to rush to Germany in 2015: "Wir schaffen das! (We can do it!)" millions of people take these words literally.

Ms. Baerbock is either extremely stupid and/or extremely immoral. She knows that by extending an open invitation to refugees she potentially exposes millions of Afghans to the extortions of smugglers and the rigors of the oncoming winter. She knows that these refugees will either languish in Turkey - whose dictator the EU will bribe with an additional €3 billion, drown in the Aegean Sea or enter the EU and thus aggravate the socioeconomic problems and political polarization afflicting this continent.

The reason she doesn't care is because her slogans are a Pavlovian reflex tailored for her electorate: the well-to-do left-liberal establishment that exalts the illegible nonsense of Habermas and has been brainwashed to believe Germany has a rotten core. These progressive Germans feel a pathological need to prove to themselves (and to the world) that their nation is not evil.

As far as Jews are concerned, they would be right in encouraging Germans to hate their past and their country's essence, if this helped them. Unfortunately, Germany's guilt complex doesn't translate into genuine philosemitism, but mainly to promote massive Islamic immigration, since Muslim refugees are viewed by progresssives as supposedly being in the same situation as Jews were during the 1930s.

Austria, on the other hand, where denazification was never really attempted, has elected a conservative chancellor who is unabashedly pro-Jewish and who is not motivated by feelings of guilt and shame, but by a shared affinity for the values that Zionism embodies. Since in Germany national pride, patriotism and the defence of national sovereignty have been repudiated, Germans are de facto anti-Zionists whose main reason for not being openly anti-Israel is their guilt complex toward Jews. As we see in Germany's appeasement of the Iranian Ayatollahs, genuine friendship and solidarity toward Jews cannot be built on guilt feelings.

Unfortunately, the need to exorcise the past is only one aspect of Germany's malaise. The second German vice is the idealism of its political culture, which subordinates realism to megalomania. Germany has since 2015 already spent over €100 billion to host a paltry two million refugees. Had a fraction of this amount been spent in the Middle East and North Africa, Germany could have tripled the education and health budgets of the whole Maghreb region and Fertile Crescent.

Unfortunately, doing this would not allow progressive German politicians like Ms. Baerbock and Ms. Merkel to take selfies with the refugees they have saved. Neither would they be able to cudgel with moral authority the governments of Hungary, Poland (and now Austria) for not sharing Germany's "humanitarian values".

2015 was undoubtedly a blessing for Germany's international image. That this PR boon precipitated Brexit and destroyed the commonality of interests between EU states was collateral damage. As Ms. Merkel said "It is in the nature of Germany to do great things."

Germany's progressive politicians appear to be trying very hard to sink Europe once again into chaos. In this quest they can count on Germans' proverbial thoroughness: Once they decide that a course of action is worth pursuing, German leaders can generally count on the obedience of pliant subjects until the bitter end.

Rafael Castro is a Yale and Hebrew University educated business and political analyst based in Europe. Rafael specializes in proofreading, editing and ghostwriting quality texts for entrepreneurs and politicians. Rafael can be reached at [email protected]