In an interview in Germany’s Bild am Sonntag, the country’s Development Minister, Gerd Müller, says:
The people fleeing hunger, misery, violence, and because they see no future for themselves and their families. But we live in a globalized world. We can not build fences around Germany and Europe. When people suffer, they will come. … The biggest refugee movements are ahead: Africa’s population will double in the coming decades.
Und:
Only ten per cent of the refugee flow from Syria and Iraq has reached us. Eight to 10 million are still on their way. Those who come to us now, for several years sat in the tent cities, basements or goat stables without water and electricity. It is shameful that the international community is not able to ensure the survival on the spot.
Und:
We need a reduction. One million, like last year, we cannot successfully integrate. At the same time we have to assume our responsibility in the world in another dimension, as we do that so far all in Europe. We have built our prosperity on the back of the developing countries. That will not do any longer. These tensions are discharged.Then do not care what we define here. The people are not going to ask if they can come.
Read the whole thing. I invite German speakers to offer a better translation from the original; I’ve cleaned up Google Translate’s version somewhat, but as I don’t speak German, it is likely that I made some errors.
So, what do you think? The German government minister says that there is no way to stop the human tidal wave about to sweep over Europe, and besides, Europe has it coming because Europeans have allegedly gotten rich by exploiting the Third World. “The people are not going to ask if they can come,” says the humanitarian. So Germany, and Europe, have no moral right to assert control over their borders, to say who can and who cannot enter into their community? This is a shocking statement from a senior official of any government: that the borders must remain open. That Europe is supposed to commit civilizational suicide in reparation for its capitalist crimes.
It’s straight out of The Camp of the Saints. It really is. It is astonishing. We are watching something of world-historical importance unfold. An entire civilization is being invaded by an army with no weapons but their poverty and their desire, and the civilization’s leaders are surrendering without a fight. Perhaps they believe they have nothing to fight for.
I read The Camp of the Saints last year, and blogged about it. ‘memba this?:
Accepting Third World migrants as an act of redemption. That is one of the main themes of Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, which I finished reading this weekend. … Even a bad book may have something valuable to say to us. This is true of The Camp of the Saints. One aspect of the novel that I can’t shake off, though, is Raspail’s portrait of the migrants as not giving a damn about European civilization. It’s nothing personal; rather, they don’t believe they are coming to Europe as beggars who ought to be grateful for charity, but move as a mass that believes it is entitled to what the Europeans have. Europeans, by contrast, are, in the book, the ones who agonize over their civilization, whether it is worth defending, and what it means to be truly Western. The leaders in Camp of the Saints are not consciously surrendering, but rather they mask their cultural surrender with humanitarianism. They think that by flinging their doors open to the Third World masses, they are being good Westerners.
This is why the real villains in Raspail’s novel aren’t the migrants, but the European elites. He believes, it appears, that the Europeans ought to do whatever it takes to defend their civilization from the barbarian invasion. Raspail denounces contemporary France, though, as an exhausted civilization that is eager to be relieved of its burdens. To borrow a line from Cavafy, “those people, the barbarians, were a kind of solution.”
Meanwhile, Mein Kampf has just gone on sale in Germany again, for the first time since the war, its copyright having expired. Despite costing about $75 per copy, You-Know-Who’s manifesto quickly sold out.
This is like something from a dystopian novel. But I said that already.