If, as predicted, political instability is the consequence of the recent elections, we may have to face dangerous foreign policy problems in Germany.
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In Will the Nazis Make a Comeback?, I wrote:
“Today’s [January 10, 2005] Wall Street Journal editorial about The German Disease and the op-ed piece Welfare Uber Alles by Daniel Schwamenthal provide some ponderable statistics.
“The editorial writers point out that an export trade surplus is no guarantee of domestic prosperity. Despite being the world’s leading exporter, Germany suffers a rising unemployment rate now at 10.8%, roughly double the rate in the United States.
“Daniel Schwamenthal describes what amounts to a death wish that characterizes German socialism. The main elements of Germany’s problems apply also to the Scandinavian countries and France.
“It is not going very far out on a limb to say that, barring a sharp reversal of secularity and its religious doctrine of socialism, the European Union is doomed to ever greater collectivization of power in Brussels, as the EU planners struggle to deal with the economic cancer besetting its largest members. With that tendency, it’s hard to see much good in France’s effort to make the socialist EU into a countervailing power to block the United States.....
“As we saw with Germany in the 1930s, political societies suffering long-term economic woes become vulnerable to the inherent bias of socialism toward militarism and totalitarianism. A strong-arm leader, beginning with Napoleon and continuing with Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, generally takes advantage of public misery to seize dictatorial power.”
Many analysts are predicting that the recent election that produced a stalemate between Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats and Gerhard Schroeder’s Social[ist] Democrats will lead to further instability. They expect that no coalition will succeed in governing for a full term.
Ominously, the political party making statistically the greatest gain was the far-left successor to the communist party. Just this sort of political instability, atop deteriorating economic conditions, set the stage in the 1930s for Hitler’s accession to power.
The only significant difference between Soviet socialism and Hitler’s National Socialism was the latter’s emphasis on race-based nationalism.
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