Yesterday evening I attended a presentation by an analyst from the George C. Marshall Foundation.  They’re the outfit that was (of course) named after General of the Army George C. Marshall — to date the only professional military officer to receive, deservedly, the Nobel Peace Prize — and the purpose of which, in addition to preserving the documentary legacy of the man, his times, and his activities, also is to perpetuate Marshall’s legacy of magnanimity, cooperation, and commitment to the practicalities of creating those domestic and international structures and systems which form the framework upon which peace can be built.

If this sounds a bit unusual for an outfit that is not only named for a life-long soldier, but to this day is headquartered at a military college (the Virginia Military Institute), you really ought to read a bit more about Marshall.  For an officer who was scrupulously non-political (at least in his dealings with his civilian masters in FDR’s White House and in Congress), he was acutely sensitive to the fundamental political nature of the American military.  Again, that’s not a contradiction.  FDR famously addressed everyone by his first name.  These days it’s become fashionable because it’s considered egalitarian; perhaps it is, when everyone calls everyone by his first name.  But of course no one called FDR “Franklin”; his assumption of the prerogative was therefore diminishing to the addressee.  It’s a gentler form of the same method vulgarly practiced by LBJ in appearing naked in front of men he wished to intimidate.  In any event, FDR tried that business on with Marshall, who replied, “It’s ‘General Marshall,’ Mr. President.”  Congress recognized in him someone who was so straightforward with it he could appear before a committee, explain what he needed, and he was accepted at his word.  Mostly.  Once a particular senator from Missouri who headed an eponymous committee to investigate fraud, waste, and abuse in the war effort got to poking around in areas that weren’t exactly public.  Marshall got wind of it and put the word out that Senator Truman was simply not to be told certain things.  But it was Marshall who realized, and was greatly concerned about, the disruptions to American civil society that threatened from a long war.  He understood that an American wartime military must be a political expression of its society.  This directionality of the relationship was in contrast to, for example, the Soviet Union or Germany, in which civil society (to the extent they even had any left) was an adjunct to, and formed by, the military.  It was Marshall who looked Winston Churchill in the face and told him, with respect to some cock-eyed proposal to invade Rhodes, “Not one American soldier is going to die on that goddam beach.”  And finally, it was Marshall who put his credibility behind the effort to re-build the societies destroyed by the war, in a way that hadn’t been tried after the first go-round.

Truman it was who described Marshall as “the great one” of his era.  When you look at his breadth of comprehension and his iron-clad character it’s hard to disagree much with that statement.

In any event, the topic of yesterday’s presentation was the Ukrainian situation and its implications for Europe and Europe’s relationship with the U.S.  The presenter is a German lawyer with a Ph.D. from Harvard, and extensive experience as a reporter/analyst not only in Europe but also in central Africa.  She was in Rwanda in 1994, within weeks after the genocide.  And so forth.  Very impressive C.V., all in all.  She’s now based in the foundation’s Berlin office.

Her take on the situation is that the Ukraine represents the gravest crisis for the West since the break-up of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.  Putin is trying to re-establish, not the Soviet Union, but rather the Soviet sphere of influence.  That effort is bound to de-stabilize not only the countries targeted (especially Belarus, Moldova, the Ukraine) but also Russia itself.  This is principally because, as she phrased it, other than a pile of cash, Russia’s not got any of the things needed to make the program work over time.  Once the cash is gone, and it will go (she didn’t mention the fracking revolution, but that technology may be the deadliest threat to Putin, even moreso than any nuclear deterrent), they’ve got nothing.  Their demographics are headed for societal implosion.  Their education system is awful.  Their economy is awful.  Their healthcare system is awful.  Their transportation system is awful.  Over everything lies the suffocating blanket of corruption.  And on and so forth.  For the long haul — she predicted “a generation” of turmoil in Eastern Europe — she was pretty sanguine.  Didn’t seem to think military action likely.  I wish I could join her in her optimism.  When someone is playing against long odds, as Putin is, the only way he wins the game is on a long shot.  With each gamble that doesn’t pan out, his objective motivation to double down increases because the aggregate odds against him increase with each lost bet.  There’s a reason, after all, why Germany’s and Japan’s losing phases of their wars got so vicious.

Another of the threads of her presentation, and of her responses to some specific questions afterwards, was the current state of the German-American relationship.  Once more, she had a fairly positive take on the connections at the policy-maker level, although she was pretty up-front that the NSA spying revelations had badly shaken people in Berlin.  She also shared something that I hadn’t thought of.  She allowed that a very great deal of “public” comment in newspapers and other mass media, including specifically the internet, is and is known to be bought-and-paid-for trolling.  Propaganda, in other words.  Beyond citing her connections inside German media she didn’t describe how this is known to be.  It certainly is possible; George Soros and his fellow left-extremists maintain several operations here in the U.S. who monitor various public-forum communications and regularly flood the waves, so to speak, with astroturf outrage.  The Occupy “movement” was little more than astroturf in the streets.  So it can be done.

One thing she also mentioned, and which got me to thinking (difficult, I know), was her observation that for many years America has been a foil for the streak of Romantic idealism that is so strong in German culture and politics.  Years ago while studying in Germany I took a lecture course in American colonial history.  The professor’s particular specialty was colonial New England history.  It was fascinating to see an outsider’s take on one’s own world.  One of the points he made, several times during the course, was the extent to which Puritan idealistic sensibilities still inform American society and especially its politics.  So when our presenter yesterday evening mentioned the repulsive aspects of the German view of America (as opposed to its simultaneous attractive aspects) as being rooted specifically in German idealism, the thought struck me that what you’ve got is competing idealistic sensibilities, and I wondered to what extent their incongruity traces back to the distinctions in the religious traditions that gave rise to them (Pietism on the one hand and Puritanism on the other).  I wonder if anyone’s ever looked at it from that angle, and if so what their conclusions were.  Sort of like neighboring families who’ve been picking at each other so long no one even remembers what it all started about, it would be amusing to tease out whether we’re grousing over two religious traditions that go back over 300 years.

I just wish I could feel as confident in the long-term future as she seems to.  My boys are 12, 10, and 8.  That “generation of turmoil” our presenter sees on the horizon will consume their childhoods and young adulthoods.  And it may consume them, depending on how badly the parties miscalculate.

People will wipe their feet on you.  That advice was given to my mother and her sister by my grandmother decades ago and repeatedly shared with me over the course of my childhood.  In this respect I should observe that my grandmother was the oldest of eleven children.  Her parents wanted her to quit school after 8th grade and go to work in a cigar factory.  She refused and finished high school.  She then worked her way through U of Michigan’s School of Public Health (they and Johns Hopkins were the only two in the country back then) on her knees, as a maid.  At some point she met my grandfather, a World War I veteran and Harvard law grad (I’ve got his diploma, signed by Dean Pound . . . it’s tiny and is printed on what appears to be extremely flimsy paper).  She never lost the edge her youth and young adulthood put on her.

My grandmother was full of good Midwestern German wisdom (which I’ll take over Sonia Sotomayor’s any day), a great deal of which got shared with me over the years.  Expressions like “tarted up like Mrs. Astor’s cab-horse” and “driving your hogs to a poor market,” and of course the old chestnut, “if you don’t take care of what you have, you’ll never have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of.”  Or the Depression-era “Use it up; wear it out; make it do; do without.”  The title and opening line of this post were another one.

All of which is an introduction to an article which appeared recently in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.  It’s a report on a letter written by a young female police officer in Bochum, in the Ruhr Valley area.  It’s not as bad there as it once was, when the Krupps and the Thyssens ruled the roost and it was hard to see the ground from an airplane at 5,000 feet on an otherwise “clear” day (there’s a distressing picture in Wm. Manchester’s The Arms of Krupp, taken of Essen from the air, and you can’t see much beyond smokestacks poking through the gloop).  It’s not even as bad as when Günther Wallraff went undercover as a Turkish immigrant in Ganz Unten.  But it’s still a pretty grim part of the world.  And as is typical of most grim parts of the world, those strata of society that are dysfunctional, fractured, marginal, and unstable drift there.  In Europe that means, most prominently among other groups, Muslim immigrants; specifically, it means unassimilated Muslim immigrants.  We’ve all heard about the no-go zones in London and other large British cities, and we recall the news video of the Paris suburbs burning for days on end.  Germany’s got its share of such problems.

Here in the United States we’ve got our own immigration problems.  What makes America’s immigration issues different from Europe’s is that a great deal of our dynamics of non-assimilation is driven by the fact that the immigrants are here illegally.  Because they’re here illegally they dare not — in many respects could not even if they wanted to — approach the formalities of American life and integrate into larger society.  This is ironic, of course:  Illegal immigrants are all over the place, living in plain sight, and yet through conscious policy choices of administration officials they are not “seen.”  The immigrants understand that could change in a heartbeat.  It is precisely the same logic which leads gun owners to resist things like registration.  “Oh, we’re not wanting to take your guns; we just want to gather data.”  Right.  And what happens when the Powers That Be decide to do something more than just gather data?  The illegal immigrants know that all it would take would be an administration that decided to enforce the law and suddenly having that fixed address and being on the property tax rolls becomes not a badge of acceptance, of success, of having got on the train at last and heading forward.  It becomes a how-to-find-me-and-send-me-back-where-I-risked-my-life-to-flee.  Ditto the bank account; ditto the health insurance policy.  And so forth.

So here in the United States we have created politically and legally a ghettoization of a group of immigrants.  Let’s be honest about this:  For many players in the market and in politics the existence of this 10-plus million strong marginalized, vulnerable group of people suits them just jim dandy.  Because the continuation of their presence here is dependent on the government’s conscious policy choice not to go after them, they are beholden to whatever party <cough, cough!> promises to continue that policy.  And so they turn out in droves, carrying signs many of them can’t read, all pre-printed by sundry astro-turf “community organizers,” to boost one particular party.

By remaining unassimilated the illegal immigrants remain deprived of the language of commerce, of advancement, of the knowledge of how to navigate the paths to prosperity that seem to be found so readily by legal immigrants of all groups (including the legal immigrants from the same countries as the illegals).  They are therefore dependent upon the mountebanks within their own ranks to “represent” them to the other side of that artificially created and maintained divide.  This dependence produces political power and money for those hucksters.  [There is a reason that so-called “bi-lingual education” has always been popular with the immigrant political class and — historically at least — extremely unpopular with the actual immigrant parents themselves.  They know exactly what the score is, and most of them understand that “bi-lingual education” means “we’re going to keep your children illiterate in the language of the place where they live, so that they too will remain poor, vulnerable, and dependent on us.”]

By remaining unassimilated the illegal immigrants are self-outlawed.  “Outlawry” in olden times was not what it has come to be viewed as today.  Today when we describe someone as an “outlaw” we think of someone who does as he pleases, usually violently and flagrantly, and keeps on doing it until he’s caught.  At which point he suddenly becomes very keen on upholding the processes and substance of the law, at least insofar as presumptions of innocence, due process, right to counsel, right to confrontation of witnesses, and prohibiting cruel and unusual punishments are concerned.  Suddenly our brazen “outlaw” who professed contempt for all us milque-toast drudges in our daily slavery to The Man becomes the most law-abiding, upstanding citizen among us.  Back in the day an “outlaw” was someone who had been formally placed beyond the protection of the law.  It was a judicial sentence to be Cain, but without God’s mark to protect.  As Cain feared would be the case with him, every man’s hand was raised against the outlaw and he had no recourse.  Welcome to the world of an illegal immigrant.  Your boss decides he’s going to pay you $3.75 an hour?  Yeah, go report him to the Department of Labor.  You’ll be on the next bus to Tijuana.  Missing OSHA-mandated safety equipment?  Tell that to the sheriff’s deputies who are there to arrest . . . you.  Don’t like working a fourteen-hour day?  How long are you going to have to work when they send your butt back home?

In Europe, and especially in Germany, the problem isn’t illegal immigration.  They’re all there, more or less, according to law.  In fact in Germany many of them are the descendants of immigrants who were invited (I’m tempted to say “lured”) to what was then West Germany, way back when the post-World War II labor shortage was beginning to pinch.  Huge numbers of those earlier immigrants and their descendants have melted into the fabric of German society.  Many more of the recent arrivals haven’t.  And they have no interest in assimilating.

From what I see in the news, a parallel society is developing, a society in which, if you’re Muslim, you live by different rules than the surrounding society.  If you get cross-ways with someone else, you settle your differences outside the ordinary processes of the law.  If someone seriously transgresses, he is punished, not by the lawfully constituted authorities but rather by what amounts to elders.  That is, of course, unless his victim’s clan gets to him first.

That’s what this police officer was writing about.  She herself is of Greek ancestry, but was born and grew up in Germany.  The article doesn’t say when her people came to Germany.  She went to the Gymnasium, graduated, and became a police officer.  She’s got ten years’ service under her belt.

She was called to respond to an incident (the article doesn’t say of what sort) and the Turkish man who had called the police refused to deal with her.  He insisted on dealing with a male police officer.  That’s precious.  Law enforcement as à la carte menu.  Her experience that day was just another in a long line.  According to her letter, she and her colleagues are daily confronted with immigrant perps, mostly Muslim, who “do not have the slightest respect” for the police.  Apparently she gets to see it from both sides.  To the Turks she’s just another German cop; but even though born in Germany, she’s still first-generation, and cannot but feel awkward when so much of the public disorder is identifiably associated with immigrants, at least some of whom are like herself first-generation.

“Where have we got to?” she asks in her letter, “Have we gone so far that the German police and the state have negatively to adapt themselves, and we have, in certain life- or duty-situations, to give up our democratic understanding?”  In her experience gentleness does not work with these people, who have “zero respect” for the police and for German law in general.  Only “earnest” sanctions, such as fines, reduction or withdrawal of public assistance, or prison will get their attention.  Public assistance?  Yep; in Germany, as in France and Britain, the same dynamic plays out that we got to see with the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston:  Those who would destroy the state, violently, are in fact generally to be found in the hand-out line.

At the risk of understatement, this police officer’s letter, written to her trade union magazine, struck a chord with her colleagues.  “Countless” (so the FAZ) of her fellow officers responded to her letter, the overwhelming majority of them with sympathy and praise.  And of course their own stories.  Among them are it seems not a few of supervisors advising line cops not to file complaints for insults, physical resistance, or bodily injury from immigrant perps.  It just causes trouble is the philosophy.

In October, 2010 Chancellor Angela Merkel came right on out and said it:  the mutli-cultural experiment has been “an absolute failure.”  So what gives?  Although he was dismissed from the Bundesbank for his troubles, Thilo Sarrazin’s 2010 book Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany Does Itself In), in which he made the mistake of pointing out that, among all immigrant groups, the Muslims accounted for the overwhelming proportion of demands on the state’s welfare and criminal-justice systems, found deep resonance among the population at large (the link is to Der Spiegel’s English-language site, and is an article that pre-dates his firing).  What is the source of the disrespect, if a large majority of the ethnic German population takes umbrage at the Muslim immigrants’ attitude?

I’m going to suggest that the Muslims’ actions are a rational response to the world they see around themselves.  Our letter-writing police officer hints at the root of the problem:  The consequences of lawless behavior are not such as will gain the respect of someone who does not share an innate sense of respect for Law in general.  It’s not hard to understand, really.  As my mother used to explain it to me when I was a child, “You can do the right thing for the right reason, or you can do it for the wrong reason.  The right reason is that it’s the right thing to do.  The wrong reason is that I will wear you out if don’t do it.  So you’ve got a choice; you can do it for the right or the wrong reason.  But you’re going to do it.”

What’s happened across Western society is we’ve watered down the second half of my mother’s choice.  Sure, it’s not uniform.  Here in the United States, or in at least some parts of them, we actually do physically punish people who step out of line.  We make them go live in confined quarters with unpleasant people, live under the constant watch of people who get to tell them what to do, and we make them do it for years on end.  But even that degree of punishment is watered down.  Go find someone who’s worked as a prison or jail guard, and ask them what it’s like to work there.  Having urine thrown in your face is a common experience; so also is the experience of seeing the guy who threw it essentially get a pass.  Elsewhere in Western society, if you look at the sentences for what any reasonable person would describe as heinous crimes, it’s laughable.  Or, rather, it would be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic.  The FAZ routinely reports sentences of five years or less for stuff that falls into the bury-him-under-the-jail category.  In fact, it’s not unusual to see reported sentences for property crimes exceed those for homicide.  What?

How seriously a system takes its rules can be measured by the consequences for their violations.  If in a baseball game you swing a bat at anything but a baseball, you get ejected.  Bet on baseball and your career is over.  Forever.  Ask Pete Rose.  In football, if you put your helmet down and spear the quarterback, you’re going to get to peel several thousand dollars off your hip and it’s going to be a while before they let you play again.  When the salary differential for starting players and bench-riders is as large as it is in professional sports, losing that starting slot even for a few weeks can make millions of dollars of difference to your career.  In Texas, if you kill someone in cold blood, or while committing a violent felony, they’ll sentence you to die.  And they’ll actually strap you down and kill you.  At West Point (at least at one time this was true) if you got caught telling a lie, or lifting someone’s property from his desk, or cribbing on an exam, you were standing out in front of the front gates within 24 hours.  Those institutions took their rules seriously.

Why should a group of outsiders, who choose to remain outsiders, have greater respect for a system of rules than that held by the “insiders”?  Historically Germans have nurtured a famous cultural awe of Rules.  It’s got them (and most of Europe) in hot water over the years.  It’s still there, too.  But it’s certainly not genetic, which is to say that human nature in Germany isn’t, over the long run, going to turn out to be materially better or worse than anywhere else.  And that means that, unless the Germans are willing to make a conscious effort to do so, people there will be little better than they ought to, if that.

The robustness of punishment as a back-stop for virtue is that it does not depend for its efficacy on any action or attitude from its object.  Or at least not on anything more complex or variable than aversion to pain and suffering.  “Rehabilitation” as a penal principle requires you to assume that (i) it’s possible, and (ii) a particular criminal is willing to be rehabilitated.  Relying on ordinary mortals’ respect for the Law to produce orderliness in society requires you to assume that (i) large numbers of people agree with the Law, and (ii) large numbers of people will willingly comply with the Law even when not directly under the watch of law enforcement.  I will state that those are universally unrealistic assumptions.

I will also state that, in the specific context of Muslim immigrants to Europe it’s not only unrealistic as an assumption, but it’s directly contradicted by the very words and deeds of the immigrants in question.  Large numbers of those immigrants view Western society, its pluralistic values, its permissive approach to individual behavior, and its tolerance of dissent with nothing short of contempt.  They not only don’t respect the Law as they find it in Germany; they hate it.  And if they can observe that their flaunting of it will result in no physical or financial consequences for them, why on earth should they not flaunt it?

The Blogfather has repeatedly observed, in connection with the different treatment of Christians versus militant Muslims by the Western legacy media, that the central point of distinction is that Muslims will slice the throats of those who offend their sensibilities while Christians do not.  As he’s also frequently observed, incentives work, even perverse incentives.  Over millions of people and across countless trillions of individual decisions made daily, you get more of what you reward or don’t punish, and less of what you punish or don’t reward.

Western society has lain down, and Islam is proceeding to wipe its feet.  Can we be surprised?

On a final note, I’ll observe that one of the ironies of Germany’s situation arises from, of course, its particular history.  The whole point of the Nuremberg Laws was legally to exclude Jews from German society.  It was their policy that Jews could not be Germans.  This was even though by 1933 the Jews were highly assimilated (in fact, by World War I the majority of marriages among German Jews were exogamous).  There’s a wonderful if sad book, The Pity of It All, which follows German Jewry from 1743 to the Nazi take-over in 1933.  Prussia emancipated its Jews in the 1780s.  Just 150 years later all the progress was obliterated.  Nowadays they want these Muslim immigrants to become “German,” and it’s the immigrants who spit in their faces.

A few months ago I excoriated someone named Allison Benedikt here, in response to her alarming article that if you send your children to a private school, you are a bad person.  Her reasoning, such as it was, boils down to the assertion that we have a duty to send our children to public schools, irrespective of whether the schools are good, bad, or frighteningly lousy, and notwithstanding any educational needs of the specific child in question, because herding all children into government-run schools will be good for . . . the schools.  It will be good for the schools because if parents have skin in the game (even if it’s actually their children’s skin), they’ll somehow “get involved” and whatnot, and magically the schools, the quality of instruction in which is driven by decisions made by far-off bureaucrats, will improve.  Among her article’s other shortcomings I pointed out at the time, she doesn’t explain how several generations of poorly-educated Americans (because they’ve been herded into lousy government schools) are supposed to recognize a bad school or figure out how to make it into a good school.

We may count among our blessings that Allison Benedikt is not in any position to enforce her Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz theories on the backs of our children.

To see, however, how thinking like hers plays out when cloaked with governmental authority, we offer a recent decision of a family court in Germany.  In that country it is illegal to home-school your children.  The government actually does assert an over-riding monopoly on one of the more important tasks of raising succeeding generations of humans.  There is a family there, living in a town called Darmstadt, called Wunderlich.  They wanted to home school their children (four of them).  The child care mavens swooped down and back in the fall physically carted the children off to whatever Germany does with neglected or abused children.

I might here add that, unless I’m overlooking something, there is not even an allegation that the children have been physically, sexually, emotionally, or mentally abused, at least not in any reasonably accepted sense of those expressions.  The government’s objection, and its sole objection, was that the Wunderlichs wanted to teach their own children in their own home.  Period.

The German “justice” system then swung into action, stripping the Wunderlich parents of their right to determine the children’s place of residence, their right to make educational decisions, and their right to make application to public authorities (it doesn’t say whether in respect of their children or on their children’s behalf).  Since the fall school holidays the children have been in “proper” schools.

The Wunderlichs (as well as one of their children who appears by reason of his age to have some sort of independent judicial rights) filed some sort of action (being thoroughly unfamiliar with German juvenile procedural law, I have no idea how one might characterize it in terms of an American analogue) seeking to have their stripped rights restored to them.  The department of children’s services (Jugendamt) in addition to opposing the parents’ and the child’s petitions filed a cross-petition seeking to have removed from the parents also the additional right to apply for what I’ll call child support services (“Hilfe zur Erziehung,” which transliterates as “help with raising”).  I should mention that the children apparently once more live with their parents.

The parents were quite frank that the reason they wanted to have their parental rights restored is so that they can apply to emigrate to France, where homeschooling is perfectly legal.

The Darmstadt family court ruled on December 18, 2013.  Here’s the original opinion in German; here’s an “unofficial translation” courtesy of the Home School Legal Defense Association.  There’s a bit of a write-up at the HSLDA site.

There are several striking aspects of the opinion:

Again, there is no hint that the children’s physical well-being is endangered.

There is no assertion or finding that the quality of education (in a purely pedagogical sense) the children are receiving is insufficient, by either German or any other standard.

There is no assertion or finding that the children’s emotional or mental condition has been adversely affected.

In the judge’s defense, he refers to a decision of a different court, the Oberlandesgericht Frankfurt am Main, which he alleges “extensively” established that the children’s welfare is “endangered” through the parents’ refusal to send them to a regular school.  Now, I am unfamiliar with the respective jurisdictions of the Darmstadt family court versus the appellate court in Frankfurt and whether they are in the same chain of command, so to speak.  I am unfamiliar with the extent to which the proceedings in that court are binding in any other proceedings under some equivalent to the doctrines of res judicata, collateral estoppel, or full faith and credit.  I do find it curious that a judge would fail to quote or describe at all any of the specific findings or any basis for them, or to explain why those findings are binding in the present proceeding.  Maybe that’s how judges in Germany express themselves; to this ol’ redneck lawyer it seems a mite strange to adopt someone else’s factual conclusions lock, stock, and barrel without even describing them.

There is no assertion or finding that the children are not able to engage in what Americans would describe as “extra-curricular activities.”  Here it’s helpful to remember that in Germany schools as such simply do not have nearly the array of non-classroom “activities” that form such a major part of what makes an American school the place it is.  In my own experience, German schoolchildren are every bit as likely and in some respects more likely to engage in non-classroom activities, but they’ll do so through either their own clubs or the youth divisions of an adult club.  And boy howdy! the Germans sure do like their clubs.  They have to be registered, of course (e.V., as in “eingetragener Verein,” a registered club; just by way of example, the long-time soccer champions from Munich are actually F.C. Bayern München e.V.), which means that you can look up the clubs in any city.  You’ll find clubs for chess, clubs for pipe smoking, clubs for specific card games, clubs for cross-country skiing and for downhill skiing, clubs for handball, volleyball, fencing, water polo, ice hockey, lacrosse, soccer, basketball, gymnastics, photography, painting, sculpture, theater, folk dancing, brass bands, chamber music, jazz, choral societies . . . .  If you didn’t have to make a living you could probably spend an absolute majority of your evenings each month at some function of an e.V. and never participate in the same activity twice during the month.  The family court judge doesn’t even hint that the breadth of age-appropriate activities is denied the Wunderlich children.

The judge acknowledges that the Wunderlichs and their children enjoy freedom of movement.  In fact this is a constitutional right under the German constitution (Grundgesetz).  But the exercise of that constitutional right is, according to the family court, overlaid with some nebulous examination of the children’s “best interests.”  No citation to authority is given, by the way; it would be like some judge ruling that an intact family could not leave Arkansas for Iowa without first examining whether the children’s “best interests” would be served or harmed thereby.  No, dim bulb:  Constitutional rights trump things like “best interests of the children”; if you want to infringe a basic right of being an American, you need to show something more substantial that a judge who disagrees with a decision.

Notwithstanding the complete lack of findings, or in fact even any mention of evidence — documentary or live — which might have supported any unstated finding, the dear old judge, after explaining what is being asked, by whom, and for what reasons, rules that the children’s services’ petition is well-taken and should be granted; in contrast, the parents’ and children’s petitions are “unfounded” (“unbegründet”) and to be denied.

According to the Frankfurt appellate court, and the family court endorses this finding, the “concrete danger” to the children lies in (i) keeping the children in a “symbiotic family system” (O! the horror of it all!!); (ii) the failure of the “form of education” that corresponds to “recognized” and “fundamental” standards for development in the societal order.  Get that:  It’s the “form” of education that matters.  The concept of the substance of what the children are actually being taught simply does not enter into this judge’s analysis. 

By his lights, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wanting to school his children (if he’d lived to have any) at home would have failed to provide them the recognized standards of fundamental development in the (ahem) societal order then prevailing.  Let’s just put it out there:  You have to permit the Wunderlichs of the world to educate their children contrary to the dictates of modern Germany so that you may permit the Bonhoeffers of the world to educate theirs contrary to the dictates of the next national socialist state to emerge.

According to the judge, the actual damage which consummates the danger to the children arises from the very fact that the children have not, except in recent weeks, attended a “regular” school.  They’ve been deprived of all the benefits of sitting in a classroom.  Oh my ears and whiskers.  Not only that:  The parents’ struggle has for its goal binding the children to themselves to the exclusion of others; the children have until now grown up in an “isolated family enclave.”  Only recently has this “straightjacket” been removed through the intervention of “pädagogische Fachkräfte.”  I can’t translate that phrase; there’s no English equivalent to “pedagogical technician.”

The parents’ emigration plans would set all this at naught.  In fact, in France the children would not only be “exposed to the insufficient influence” of their parents, but would also be isolated by being surrounded by a foreign language.  They would grow up in a “parallel society” without learning to integrate themselves or engage in dialogue with people who think otherwise than they, in the spirit of a “lived tolerance.”  Huh?  “Intolerance” is now a basis for the state’s intervening in the child-parent relationship?  Just whose “tolerance” is the benchmark, your honor?

The balance of the opinion consists mostly of excoriation of the guardian ad litem, whom the court takes to task for allegedly representing not the children’s interests but rather the position of the parents.  In truth it sounds as though he didn’t do a terribly diligent job of making an independent investigation and report to the court.  On the other hand, if all this stuff has been already decided in another court, what’s the point?

I will say one thing, and this may be just an oversight of expression by the dear ol’ family judge.  He refers in several places to the children growing up “isolated.”  That’s a pretty strong expression to use.  But the only specific form of “isolation” he refers to is isolation from the school atmosphere.  I mean, if I were a judge and wished to emphasize that my compelling parents to send their children to a “real” school was to get them out of the house, I’d sure as hell make specific findings as to the children’s not being permitted friends outside the family, not participating in activities outside the family, not appearing in public, and so forth.

The overall sense of the opinion is of course that the state has a legitimate interest in compelling not just education of children (there’s not a single word in the entire opinion that finds the children’s factual knowledge or reasoning skills to be deficient) but the education of the children in a particular fashion and to inculcate in them a particular mode of thought.  You would think that in Germany of all places making that kind of universal claim upon the formation of the human mind and spirit would be a shot no longer on the table (to borrow a favorite P. G. Wodehouse expression).  Apparently I am wrong.

All your children are belong to us.  Gleichschaltung!

Then what’s left?  As the reader readers of this blog have figured out, I pay attention to many things German.  That’s scarcely accidental.  I spent two years there as an exchange student, both my junior years.  The first was decidedly a mixed bag as far as personal success is measured, the second was a glorious interlude in what has turned into a very mediocre existence.  In any event, I got a good snoot-ful of All Things German and like heavy metal poisoning have never got it out of my system.  Even my closest friends would tell you I can be more than a bit of a crank in that respect.

German culture runs in many channels (like any, I suppose).  Two of those can be labelled Innerlichkeit, or inwardness, and Sachlichkeit, or matter-of-factness.  The finest fruits of the former have given Western civilization some of what can with all fairness be described as its highest high points, in philology, music, philosophy, architecture, and literature.  I once read of Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor that it is “as if the eternal harmony were communing with itself.”  Musicologists have dissected it sixteen ways to Sunday but for me it remains a source of never-exhausted wonder.  Those of the latter have blown wide open the boundaries of human knowledge, and given the imprimatur “Made in Germany” an esteem unmatched anywhere in the world.  There are entire branches of science and engineering which simply would not be what they are without that relentless pursuit of understanding, that merciless logic, which the German Sachlichkeit turns on any problem that swims into its ken.

Central to — I would suggest indispensable to — both Innerlichkeit and Sachlichkeit is an insistence on clear thinking, of contemplating the world and oneself without blinders.  A core component of those processes is the willingness to call things by their correct names.

And that is why one must be alarmed by the suggestions emanating from a conference on poverty, recently proposed, to purge certain words and expressions from German discourse.  That’s right, folks:  Political correctness has come to Germany.  Their National Conference on Poverty wants to expunge expressions like alleinerziehend from the language.  That word consists of the roots allein, meaning “alone,” and the present participle of erziehen, meaning “to raise,” as in to raise a child.  It refers to someone who is raising a child by him- or herself.  In that respect it’s actually a better expression than our closest equivalent, “single parent,” because an enormous number of people who find themselves in that predicament are not the parents of the children they’re raising.  But to the German poverty industry the word is objectionable not because it does not perfectly describe what is going on, but because it doesn’t imply anything about inadequate social integration or quality of raising.  One might be forgiven for supposing that a word which mean exactly what it says, neither more nor less, and is perfectly descriptive of that concept, would be permissible.  Apparently not.

“Unemployed” as a term of art likewise won’t pass muster for the poverty mavens.  Arbeitslos, literally “workless,” might be thought a useful expression to capture the not-unimportant data point of those people who have no gainful employment.  You see, gainful employment is an important measure of wealth, in that in order to be gainful, employment must be of a sort which other people are actually willing to compensate you for doing; the being gainful part is how you can tell that engaging in it is actually generating wealth.  It’s the difference, in other words, between a prostitute and an armed robber.  Whatever one may think of the former, she is providing a service to people who, of their own volition, are willing to pay her for her efforts.  The latter, not so much.  The poverty-mongers, however, object because “there are many forms of work that do not secure an income.”  Well.  No shit?  Like being what in older, more honest times, the English used to describe as  a “sturdy beggar.”  No one ever said being a beggar was easy, but is it really helpful to lump the beggar in with the machinist whose plant got moved to a different part of the country but he can’t move with it because of family commitments like aged parents or sickly children?  Both are erwerbslos, the poverty-peddlers’ preferred expression — “without compensation,” or “without compensated labor” — but erwerbslos blurs (and the cynic cannot help but suspect that’s the whole point) that persnickety distinction that the Erwerben of the beggar will never be of use to anyone but himself, while the machinist’s efforts, once applied again, will not only profit himself but his employer and all of his employer’s customers and the people who enjoy the efforts of those customers in turn.  The guy who is trying to get back to making flat-head screwdrivers is simply not in any meaningful sense to be thought of in the same terms, economically speaking, as the guy who’s trying to get between you and your car as you cross the parking lot.

The poor-mouths likewise do not like Behindertentransport.  Here the English speaker get a taste of the German predeliction for compound words, as commented upon by the late Mr. Clemens.  The referenced word comes from two words, Behinderten, meaning “disabled,” and “Transport,” meaning exactly that.  [Aside:  This word also provides a glimpse into German’s twin influences of both Germanic and Latin origins, as well as English’s kinship with German.  The same root word gives us the English hinder and the German behindern, both meaning to place obstacles in the path of someone or something.  And of course transport means precisely the same thing in both languages.]  The issue for the hand-wringers is that in German objects are transportiert (the past participle of the verb), while humans are befördert.  The problem is that in ordinary usage, a Beförderung — a noun form — is usually applied in an alternative sense, meaning a “promotion,” as in a job.  So to speak of Behindertenbeförderung to please the bleeding hearts would sound at best confusing to the ordinary speaker and at worst comical.  The rude might be tempted to ask, “Really?  To what positions are you promoting them?”

It is alarming that Germans would contemplate going down the road we’ve travelled in the English-speaking world.  Habits of thought in fact do become habits of hands, and squishy unwillingness to call things by their correct names leads in a direct line to a squishy unwillingness to grasp problems by the scruff of the neck and then to wring same until overcome.  In today’s world this refusal to engage in clear-minded thought and plainly-confronting action is a luxury that no society can afford.  Fortunately for Germany they don’t have a local franchise of The New York Times, or the Washington Post, or Oprah joyfully to embrace and push this verbal dishonesty into standard usages of language.  Instead, even the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which is commonly described as center-right, but which I would humbly suggest is at least half a standard deviation to the left of center, pours scorn on the yammerings of the poverty cheerleaders.

But the seal has been broken.  Even if the balance of German society rightly laughs itself silly at this particular effort, the genie is out of its bottle, and it is only a matter of time before this kind of nonsense is taken seriously and — Germany being Germany, after all — engrafted into the fabric of their laws.

Well, fancy that.  If you artificially make something more lucrative relative to alternative behaviors, you get more of it.  And the greater the spread between doing X, which you make more lucrative by government fiat, and Y, your “control” behavior, the more of X you get.  You’d think this is the sort of thing that most folks would figure out by the time they’re in about seventh grade.  Leave it, however, to the government perpetually to discover this dynamic anew, every time it reaches in and monkeys with the market.

The most recent folks on whom the light of ordinary common sense has dawned are the Germans.  Their environmental minister, a boy name of Altmaier, has just figured out that Germany’s so-called “Engergiewende” (hard to render in English, but “energy change-over” is about as good as you can get without sounding goofy) is going to run upwards of one trillion Euros.  Given the predictability with which all governments, everywhere, at all times radically underestimate actual costs of messes they’ve made, the true number is likely to turn out at least double that.  Even on its own terms, that €1 trillion works out to about $1.38 trillion.  That’s a lot of money, folks.

Germany has a national-level renewable energy statute.  Under that statute people who install solar panels on their roofs, and builders of wind turbines, receive cash subsidies from the government, because of course those wonderful renewable energy sources are extortionately expensive, and the statute prescribes the price at which the renewable has to be purchased by the grid so that people will be willing to become producers of renewable energy electricity.  The cost of the subsidy thus fluctuates with the spread between ordinary electricity and the cost of the renewable; the greater the spread the greater the effective subsidy.  But it doesn’t stop there:  Because on windy and extremely sunny days the grid can’t handle all the electricity produced, the producers have to be de-coupled from the grid . . . and they’re paid just as if they were still producing for the grid.  Ca-ching!!  Of course, on calm or cloudy days, and at night every day, there’s not enough juice going into the grid, so the conventional (and remaining nuclear) producers have to maintain their old plants in stand-by to make up the shortfall, or else the population is going to go cold and dark.  Since those plants aren’t needed when the renewables are producing at adequate capacity, however, while they’re just standing there, with steam up and nowhere to put their juice (not only does the grid buy from the greenies at artificially high prices, it buys from them preferentially), they’ve got to be paid as well for not producing (or else the producers will go broke very quickly).  Ca-ching!!  And when excess electricity production pushes its way onto the grids of the Netherlands or Poland (not sure precisely why (it’s not explained in the linked op-ed), but it seems that happens as well, fairly predictably), apparently Germany has to pay for that privilege.  Ca-ching!!  Finally, because of the manner in which the German electrical grid developed over time, just fixing the bottlenecks in the national grid, so that solar- and wind-powered electricity can be moved from its point of generation to its point of use, will alone run to a third of a trillion Euros.  Ca-ching!!

If all of the above bears more than a little resemblance to U.S. agricultural policy, it’s no accident.  They are both efforts to steer, through subsidies, certain people to over-produce specific commodities and at the same time insulate the over-production from the market risk of over-production.  For a humorous (if depressing) short course on how the Soviets won the Cold War after all, see the chapter on farm policy in P. J. O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores, which over twenty years on retains its relevance.

But it gets better.  Because the German government pays a fixed price for renewable energy and sends the bill to the non-renewable customers, the risk of over-pricing and over-production is placed on the non-subsidized customer.  Householders and investors can, directly in the former case and indirectly in the latter, insulate themselves by suckling at the same tit.  With each additional subsidized producer from whom the grid has to purchase power at artificially high prices relative to non-renewable sources, the greater the incentive for the next customer to become a producer from whom unrealistically expensive power must be bought.  No one, after all, wants to be the last fossil fuel electricity customer in Germany.  And with each additional “green” electricity producer the costs go up and the pool from which those costs have to be paid goes down.  Further, since as the writer points out there are now millions of German households, investors, and industries who are getting fat from the subsidies, the subsidies are rapidly acquiring the status of sacred cows which cannot be slaughtered.

It gets even better, as it always does with government.  As the op-ed points out, the whole subsidization approach of the renewable energy law was predicated upon ever-climbing prices for fossil fuel energy.  Eventually the cost of fossil fuels would catch up with the solar- and wind-generated product and everyone would go on normally.  In doing so they mistook trend for destiny.  As the op-ed points out, not just the U.S. but Poland, Russia, Argentina, and Australia as well have within the past few years discovered massive reserves of oil and natural gas.  As and when those are developed, the price effects will destroy for decades if not generations the model the German law is based on. 

At least competition from cheap new reserves of fossil fuels is something the governments of the world can control.  They can simply decree that those newly-discovered reserves are off-limits.  Wouldn’t it be fascinating to find out who’s funding the anti-fracking lobby here and elsewhere?  Anyone want to bet that, George Soros-like, they’re players with deep commitments in the “green energy” industry?  We already know the Saudis are bankrolling the Canadian effort to strangle the oil sands development.  Dear Leader’s standing athwart the Keystone XL pipeline benefits, among others, the rail transporters of oil from the Bakken field, which would be connected with and its product moved by a completed Keystone XL pipeline, thereby eliminating all those gorgeous miles of tank cars.  [Aside:  Dear Leader and his cronies moan about the potential contamination from a potential leak, as if there were never in recorded history an incident of a bunch of tank cars derailing and rupturing.]  Perhaps not coincidentally one of those rail transporters counts among its larger stakeholders a gentleman named Warren Buffett.  Gentle Reader may remember him; he’s the chap who keeps plumping for higher taxes . . . at the same time his holding company is fighting a $1 billion tax bill from Uncle Sugar.

Who could have seen it coming?  I mean, other than a seventh-grader of ordinary intelligence?