RUTHFULLY YOURS

Most Americans are worried about our domestic crises. Obama left office after doubling the debt to $20 trillion. Near-zero interest rates over eight years have impoverished an entire generation of seniors — and yet remain key to servicing the costs of such reckless borrowing.

Over the last eight years, GDP never grew at 3 percent annually, the first time we’ve seen such low growth since the Hoover administration. Obamacare spiked health-care premiums and deductibles while restricting access and reducing patient choices. Racial politics are at a nadir and make one nostalgic for the environment before 2009.

Red-blue tensions are at an all-time high, and suddenly there is talk of 1860s-like Confederate nullification of federal laws. It’s now the norm for prominent commentators to call for the murder, forced removal, or resignation of the current president. A New York Times columnist asked the IRS to commit a felony by sending him Trump’s tax returns, and then he boasts by providing his own address.

The Democratic party is nearly ruined, reduced to a shrill coastal party animated not by an agenda but by unhinged hatred of Donald Trump and a new religion of race, class, and gender politics.

Given all that, we sometimes forget the dire situation abroad — or rather ignore that our indecision and misdirection reflect internal chaos and looming fiscal crises. The ramifications of setting faux-redlines, the reset with Russia, and then the reset of reset, radical defense cuts, and nonstop contextualization of and apology for past American behavior — all of which in part grew out of cultural wars at home or were connected to economic uncertainty — have led to a volatile world.

Here are the challenges Obama left behind:

1) The Obama radical reset with Putin, followed by about-face hostility to Russia, followed by near hysterical charges of collusion with the Trump campaign have made relations with the world’s second-largest nuclear power more dangerous than at any time since the height of the Cold War. Russia has received signals that it would face no consequences for its behavior, then that there might be consequences in theory but not in fact, and finally that it went from being a friend to an existential enemy without much pause in between.

The only deterrent in the last few years against further Russian aggression toward its former Soviet states hinged on Russia’s own perceptions of self-interest and its worries over economic anemia. It will be both necessary and nearly impossible to normalize relations with Putin, who senses that the usually pro-Russian Democrats now prefer permanent hostility (not for the sins of annexing Crimea or Eastern Ukraine but for allegedly hurting Hillary Clinton through the Wikileaks revelations). And Putin probably surmises that Trump will be forced to prove his anti-Putin fides by exaggerating the appearance of bellicosity. Tragically, Putin hovers about not just as a carrion to feast on easy scraps, but also in some strange way because he still sees some affinities and areas of mutual concern between Russia and the West.

Uninhibited by the obvious fear of their citizens, the EU nevertheless carries on its immigration policies.

Ironically, Western political elites consider this clearly widespread sentiment against Muslim immigration “racist” and “Islamophobic” and consequently disregard it – thereby empowering anti-immigration political parties.

“Islam has no place in Slovakia…. [the problem is not migrants coming in, but] rather in them changing the face of the country.” – Robert Fico, Prime Minister, Slovakia

Europe, so many years after the Cold War, is ideologically divided into a new East and a West. This time, the schism is over multiculturalism. What Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has termed ‘liberal babble’ continues to govern Western Europe’s response to the challenges that migration and Islamic terrorism have brought, especially personal security.

The Western European establishment considers arming oneself against terrorists, rapists and other ill-wishers outlandish, even in the face of the inability of Europe’s security establishments to prevent mass terrorist atrocities, such as those that took place in Paris at the Bataclan theatre or the July14 truck-ramming in Nice.

The European Union’s reaction to terror has been to make Europe’s already restrictive gun laws even more restrictive. The problem is that this restrictiveness contradicts the EU’s own reports: these show that homicides committed in Europe are mainly committed with illegal firearms.

In Eastern Europe, on the other hand, it is still normal to want to defend yourself. Last summer, Czech President Milos Zeman even encouraged citizens to arm themselves against Islamic terrorism. “I really think that citizens should arm themselves against terrorists. And I honestly admit that I changed my mind, because previously I was against [citizens] having too many weapons. After these attacks, I don’t think so [anymore]”.

Since the president’s remarks, the Czech Interior Minister, Milan Chovanec, has proposed extending the use of arms in the event of a terrorist attack. He explained that despite strict security measures, it is not always possible for the police to guarantee a fast and effective intervention. Fast action from a member of the public could prevent the loss of many lives.

Such reasoning, often seen as laughable in Western Europe, reflects an understanding of the fear that has become a recurring theme on the continent. In Germany, a recent poll showed that two out of three Germans are afraid of becoming the victim of a terrorist attack and 10% perceive an “acute threat” to their safety. Among women, the figures were even higher. 74 % responded that they sometimes feel unsafe in crowded places, and 9% said they felt permanently threatened and scared.

Europe looks united in not allowing Erdogan to export Turkey’s sometimes even violent political polarization into the Old Continent.

Erdogan clearly rejected Merkel’s mention of “Islamist terror” on grounds that “the expression saddens Muslims because Islam and terror cannot coexist”.

Turkey increasingly looks like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. A government guide refused to discuss Iraqi politics: “In Iraq half the population are spies… spying on the other half.”

Officially, Erdogan’s Turkey has embarked on a journey toward Western democracy. Instead, its Islamist ethos is at war with Western democracy.

Turkey, officially, is a candidate for full membership in the European Union (EU). It is also negotiating with Brussels a deal which would allow millions of Turks to travel to Europe without visa. But Turkey is not like any other European country that joined or will join the EU: The Turks’ choice of a leader, in office since 2002, too visibly makes this country the odd one out.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is now campaigning to broaden his constitutional powers, which would make him head of state, head of government and head of the ruling party – all at the same time—is inherently autocratic and anti-Western. He seems to view himself as a great Muslim leader fighting armies of infidel crusaders. This image, with which he portrays himself, finds powerful echoes among millions of conservative Turks and [Sunni] Islamists across the Middle East. That, among other excesses in the Turkish style, makes Turkey totally incompatible with Europe in political culture.

Yet, there is always the lighter side of things. Take, for example, Melih Gokcek, the mayor of Ankara and a bigwig in Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). In February Gokcek claimed that earthquakes in a western Turkish province could have been organized by dark external powers [read: Western infidels] aiming to destroy Turkey’s economy with an “artificial earthquake” near Istanbul. According to this conspiracy theory, the mayor not only claims that the earthquake in western Turkey was the work of the U.S. and Israel, but also that the U.S. created the radical army Islamic State. In fact, according to him, the U.S. and Israel colluded to trigger an earthquake in Turkey so they could capture energy from the Turkish fault line.

Matters between Turkey and Europe are far more tense today than ridiculous statements from politicians who want to look pretty to Erdogan. The president, just by willingly ignoring his own, powerful anti-semitic views, recently accused Germany of “fascist actions” reminiscent of Nazi times in a growing row over the cancellation of political rallies aimed at drumming up support for him among 1.5 million Turkish citizens in Germany.

As one of Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood’s characters said in Surfacing, “The trouble some people have being German, I have being human.” True enough. But these days the trouble many Germans have being Germans has little to do with the vices and cruelties of collective human nature and everything to do with modern German history and its Nazi legacy. It’s a curious, even paradoxical problem, since the vast majority of Germans are demonstrably anti-Nazi and ashamed of the country’s brutal, fascist and anti-Semitic past. They will do anything to disavow that horrendous patrimony and ensure that nothing like it ever happens again.

This is a major reason that the official and much of the public response to the migrant Islamic invasion, which is poised to bankrupt the country and unleash a firestorm of violence upon its citizens — as it is in process of doing — is so tentative, lame and mired in denial of the obvious. How can Germany permit itself to inflict upon the Islamic horde now tearing up the country the same punitive, oppressive, and potentially lethal measures it visited upon the Jewish community in the first half of the last century? How can it be seen to assemble another Wannsee Conference leading to a kind of “Final Solution,” the forcible incarceration and expulsion of the migratory wave of Muslims inundating the nation?

This is the German dilemma: the inability or unwillingness to distinguish between Judaism and Islam, to detect the difference between repression and survival, to remember that in the 1930s there were no terrorist synagogues preaching violence, the conquest of the state, and the enslavement of its citizens as today there are terrorist mosques advocating and promoting these very atrocities. The motive for defensive action is justified, but the clear-minded resolve is lacking.

Germans are prisoners of their own past, not in the sense that they wish to prolong it but precisely in the sense that they wish to prevent it. And this hampers their capacity to perceive or to acknowledge what is transpiring before their very eyes. It explains their helplessness before the social and economic devastation manifesting daily in the public square. They are making reparations for the nation’s past by sacrificing the nation’s future, by treating the treacherous and parasitical Muslim invaders of the 21st century as they should have treated the loyal and productive Jewish citizens of the 20th.