Sayeth Victor Davis Hanson:
Every 20 to 50 years in Germany, things start unraveling. Germans feel aggrieved. Ideas and movements gyrate wildly between far left and far right extremes. And the Germans finally find consensus in a sense of victimhood paradoxically expressed as national chauvinism. Germany’s neighbors in 1870, 1914, 1939 — and increasingly in the present — usually bear the brunt of this national meltdown.
Well, yeah; except that in 1870 they had just unified Prussia’s army with those of the other German states, in 1914 they had the Imperial German Army and in 1939 they had Hitler’s Nazi war machine to boss their neighbors around.
Nowadays? LOL. The Alabama National Guard could whip the Bundeswehr and still be home in time for dinner.
This time, the Germans should direct all their energies inward, to fix their festering immigration population, the unions’ stranglehold on industry and the country’s 1920s-style social decadence — but they don’t have the balls to do that, even. And I don’t see anywhere a potential Bismarck to try it all, let alone a Hitler.
It’s not often I disagree with VDH, but this is one time I do.