As social glue and as a bond tying the individual to a higher purpose of existence, patriotism has acquired a dubious reputation in Germany after decades of culture war. The United Left has succeeded in amalgamating this binding and integrating cultural ferment with the historical catastrophes of National Socialism, imperialism, and chauvinism, ultimately banishing it from the nation’s self-understanding.
Today, the patriot is regarded as a social outsider, a contrarian, an intolerant antagonist of humanistic values.
The mills of that socialist cultural revolution set in motion in the late 1960s have ground with care. A cartel of radical ideologues, opportunistic politicians, a proliferating academic establishment, and the media sector has managed to inject a sufficient dose of poison into the root system of tradition, religion, family, and the bourgeois order. The modern patriot renders himself deeply suspect if he rejects the blessings of cultural relativism and the woke nihilism of our age.
And yet conservatives are the true heroes of stability and continuity, who—like human breakwaters in today’s social storms—attempt to fend off the worst flowing toward us from the murky sources of cultural Marxism. It was not least the work of German politicians to carry out this civilizational turn: away from the Social Market Economy and a bourgeois-centered society toward a green climate socialism.
Nowhere does the anti-bourgeois reflex flourish more luxuriantly than in Germany’s NGO complex and in the shrill academic flank warfare surrounding Cancel Culture, Wokeism, and the cleansing of language—precisely targeting those terms that would open the door to a culture-affirming, tradition-confirming education.
How beautiful words like “fatherland,” “patriotism,” and “love of homeland” now sound.
Naturally, a significant portion of the political class would vehemently disagree. It has built a business model from the ingredients of contempt for the nation, globalist moralism, and climate-apocalyptic transformation logic—and founded its political existence upon it. Contempt for everything conservative is the linguistic soil in which this form of political power thrives, stabilizing and reinforcing itself within its own moral echo chamber.
That, in this self-inflicted crisis, German politicians now invoke the once-poisoned term of “location patriotism” in their defensive struggle against economic reality appears grotesque—and to those who have lost their livelihoods in the breakers of green bureaucratism, presumptuous and offensive.
Germany’s environment minister, Carsten Schneider,concludedhis recent interview marathon with a talk at the Frankfurter Rundschau. The man has nerve. After a series of very public attacks by his camp against entrepreneurs, it now seems time to change tone. Moral minor key is on Berlin’s agenda. Automakers, Schneider suggests, should increasingly source raw materials from Germany. Raw materials—from Germany?
He calls for a “lead market” for green steel—stretching reality to its limits, as green steel currently vanishes from product lines because it is neither profitable nor marketable, despite heavy subsidies.
Source: ZeroHedge News
