There’s something aggressively irritating about this phrase, isn’t there? Or is it just me?
Any demand issued by any country, even one without Germany’s track record, presupposes the possibility of enforcing compliance. That in turn implies a position of superiority, legal or otherwise.
Such a hierarchical relationship can’t possibly exist outside some kind of imperial setup, with the metropolis lording it over the colonies.
Hence, when newspaper headlines start with the words “Germany demands…”, and the countries on the receiving end belong to the EU, the inference has to be that Germany is the metropolis and the other 27 members are her dominions.
That may be the case de facto, but not yet de jure. Thus, for propriety’s sake, and also not to provoke a hostile reaction, German officials would be well-advised to refrain from butch demands and replace them with polite or, as need be, grovelling requests or pleas.
How much nicer it would be to see a headline saying “Germany begs Britain to take more migrants if at all possible”, rather than “Germany demands Britain urgently takes more migrants”, as it appeared in today’s Mail.
The more polite version would incidentally also be more grammatical, though it’s churlish to expect modern hacks even to know the word ‘subjunctive’, never mind use it properly.
Anyway, should Germany come pleading rather than demanding, one would be inclined to sympathise, if not necessarily comply. However, when Germany’s interior minister Thomas de Maiziere reminds Britain that “all EU countries must become more aware of their responsibilities”, one feels contrary. The word ‘must’ tends to have this effect.
That the Germans are getting hot under the collar is understandable. They are about to be inundated with 800,000 asylum applications, mostly from Muslims. If most of them are approved, as experience suggests they will be, the country’s social services, already bursting at the seams, may well implode.
Most approved applications will be followed by requests for family reunification. Add to this thousands of those who’ll get in without bothering about legal niceties, and Germany is looking at a massive growth to its already sizeable Muslim population of 4.3 million.
Faced with such a prospect, de Maiziere understandably ignores the fact that Britain isn’t one of the 26 parties to the Schengen agreement (one removing border checks and passport controls) and can therefore decline to accept any more migrants.
Yet treaties mean nothing when Germany demands. Britain MUST realise that the EU is the politically correct version of the German Reich – and act in a suitably servile manner. “Jawohl, Herr Minister!” would do nicely, not “we already have enough Muslims, thank you very much”.
As a useful illustration of how well the Schengen agreement works, a Moroccan immigrant yesterday embarked on a high-speed train going from Amsterdam to Paris. This being a Schengen area, his passport wasn’t checked.
More important, neither was his luggage that contained such essential travel items as an AK assault rifle, an automatic pistol, a knife and enough ammunition to murder all 554 passengers on board.
Just as the Muslim began firing he was heroically subdued by three US off-duty servicemen and a British expat. Another massacre prevented, many more to come – some conceivably with deadlier weapons than a Russian-made rifle.
There’s no point debating the advisability of having no border controls across a vast continent at peacetime, although one could think of a few valid arguments against.
The critical thing to understand, Herr de Maiziere, is that, watch my lips: WE. ARE. NOT. AT. PEACETIME. Verstehen Sie?
Criminally idiotic action by America and Britain has injected murderous energy into the Islamic world. This fanned up the hostility to the West that Islam has felt – and practised – ever since its birth 1,400 years ago.
Just like the 100 Years’ War didn’t involve 100 years of non-stop fighting, the war waged by Islam on the West has been intermittent, and outbursts of violence have alternated with periods of relative calm.
Largely by our own fault, Islam is currently going through a period of peak passion, spilling out all across the globe, especially in the Middle East and Europe. Since no one has yet repealed the law of self-preservation, we have the right to defend ourselves.
This involves applying wartime rules to all possible sources of danger, of which the burgeoning Muslim population of Europe is emphatically one. Once such a shift has been accepted as necessary, specific measures can be worked out by those with more expertise in this field than I possess.
Suffice it to say that the overall objective has to be not increasing but reducing the current, suicidally large presence of Muslims in Europe. That might involve, for starters, banning all Muslim immigration, curtailing the Muslims’ freedom of travel, suspending the peacetime limitations on surveillance – as I say, let the experts decide.
However, it would be naïve to expect anything like that ever to happen barring a nuclear explosion in a European city centre – perhaps not even then. Not as long as Germany demands and our own spivs obey.