Danish teen fought off her attacker - now she'll face fine

[DFW]

191. It's more nuanced than that

France has a useless socialist government where 40% (!!!!!!!) of the employed work for the government. Germany has a functioning social democracy with a "conservative (still to the left of anything we've had since FDR)"-led coalition. Belgium is a basket case, Holland gets by, but these two are small, densely populated countries with a population of between 11 and 15 million and about the size of Connecticut. You can drive from the Dutch coast on the North Sea to the border in about two hours. It takes longer than that to drive the Massachusetts Turnpike! Germany is about 85% of the area of California, but has a population a quarter the size of the entire USA. Europe is CROWDED. Add to this the fact that German governments of right or left still (to their credit, I might add) feel a deep moral obligation to help people in dire need due to their history in the first half of the past century.

The trouble is that they make no secret of this, and they get overwhelmed by scammers who know that in the past, all they had to was to show up and say "me persecuted!" and they'd get a free apartment, a living allowance and other perks that local citizens did not. Resentment festered, but as long as abuse was minimal, it stayed at that level. My wife went crazy dealing with trying to place hard core unemployed into jobs, but many would have had to take a pay cut if they worked, so they found doctors who took bribes to declare them unfit for work, claimed not to know the language well enough to work (after, in some cases over 20 years in Germany!), even, in one of her cases, fathered 15 children, collected government child subsidies for each one, and then kept the money for himself and let the various mothers of these children fend for themselves. These are some of the extreme examples, of course, but they and their like gave a bad name to the other 90% of asylum seekers who came for legitimate reasons. The percentages may be similar, but 10% of a million is still a LOT of bad apples. The left doesn't appreciate German women getting harassed on the street or calls for them to adapt their behavior to accommodate Arab morality any more than the right does.

Each country has its own issues. France let nearly all who wanted to come from its North African colonies come be French citizens when they granted those colonies independence. Huge numbers did just that. Most of them knew French, but they didn't know France. When they brought their local religion and mores with them, and passed them on to the next generation in their ghettos, the seeds of conflict were sewn.

Belgium's minority French-speaking Walloons invited hundreds of thousands of Moroccans to come to Belgium, offered them generous social packages, and reminded them "vote for us!" Well, the Moroccans did just that, and were granted wide immunity from prosecution for crimes as well. Government censors, for a while, forbade the media, when reporting on violent crime, to say who the perpetrators were (if they were Moroccan). It gave rise, predictably, to ugly far right movements among the Belgian majority Flemish, who are Dutch-speakers. They started to cynically say, when violent crimes were reported without identifying who had committed them, "it was those Swedish people again."

Germany has had its problems with some of the millions of Turkish-speaking "guest workers," invited starting in the 1950s to help ease the labor shortage. Most stayed on, and it created cultural clashes, but the Turks--many of whom are now the adult children of the original guest workers and full German citizens--are widely assimilated now. They are business owners, TV reporters, journalists, one even is Party leader of the Greens. He speaks accent-free German, and no one gives his ethnicity a second thought. But the Turks came to waiting jobs, and bringing modest expectations. Turkey in the 1950s was not exactly what you would have called cosmopolitain. The 10% of the people now streaming in with big expectations and short fuses are going to clash with the local populations, and give the other 90% a bad name. And no one knows who they are or how to identify them, because no one figured out how to screen a million people in three months, or that they should have prepared for them before they arrived.

What the German government missed is that it is not showing "tolerance" when they turn their back on their own citizens when they encounter violence at the hands of newcomers brought in by that same government. I talked with my wife today in Germany before flying up from Dallas here to Northern Virginia. She was with an old friend of of ours and his Russian girlfriend. They are both in their late 60s. The Russian woman speaks no German, so my wife can't converse with her, but the German man has been a friend of ours for over 30 years. He is an old die-hard socialist from an old working class family in the industrial town of Oberhausen. He lives in Köln now, and even he has got a bad case of what my wife calls "the refugee blues." He had desperately wanted the wave of immigrants to assimilate into a working-class new wave of grateful new Germans. After the attacks in Köln on New Year's Eve, his ideals have suffered, since reality has refused to conform to them. My wife, by contrast, also a loyal SPD or Greens voter, expected the mess, and thus was not disabused of any rosy illusions when that mess ensued.

It's not that Europe is fed up with the left. They are fed up with smug, incompetent bureaucrats, most of whom can't be fired, who dream up schemes in their offices, but never think out the consequences, never see the consequences, and never have to take responsibility when they fuck up. This is not a right or left phenomenon, but a very European phenomenon. When these useless government employees are there for life and can't be fired, they have no incentive to be creative or useful. Some have consciences and are both, but far too many are not. To change that, you'd have to erase the whole system of protected functionaries. When, for example as in France, they represent FORTY per cent of the work force, good luck in getting THAT system changed.