232. Preponderance of the small (V)

The German mind, from Hegel to Jung, has a fascination with depth and the unconscious; no other European race thinks this way. Hegel’s method is akin to the development of a photograph; the latent aspect is revealed by action, the image was always there but it was invisible without developing fluid—if you can excuse such an antique metaphor. This is what Hegel means he when says that the owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk; we act, then we understand the action after the event. The same approach is evident in Goethe; in Elective Affinities a character’s true emotions are revealed when she blots ink on a letter—a literary forerunner to the Rorschach test, another Germanic invention. This mode of thought reached its apotheosis in Freud and Jung: there is even a German word—Hintergedanken or “behind thought”—to describe this approach; it is entirely German, the English have no hinterland: what you see is what you get, more or less.

Let us apply German methods to a German problem: the migrant crisis. As with many races, the Germans are a victim of their own success. The Jews are more intelligent than most, but this grants them a weakness for novelty and quarrels; hence the old saying: “Two Jews, three opinions.” The worst enemies of the Jews in the contemporary world are not neo-Nazis or Islamists; their worst enemies are other Jews: men like Chomsky, whose brilliant rhetoric convinces the masses to despise Israel—if his ideas succeeded, millions of Jews would be slaughtered.

Similarly, there are Jews so keen for novelty that they end up in neo-Nazi outfits, perhaps because they have quarrelled with all the other Jews—possibly out of boredom. The English are, of course, victims of their own politeness. Hence it is possible to bomb them, rape their children, and remove their free speech and yet they will still say: “I’m terribly sorry, would you care to saw off my head now? No rush. And do let’s not speak about it, it would be frightfully unpleasant.”

The German problem is that they are entirely logical, thorough, and precise in everything they do—a real Herrenvolk, in fact. Hence when the Germans did liberal-democratic decadence, they did it better than anyone else and created voluptuous Weimar; when they did nationalism, they took it to its logical conclusion and exterminated anyone who was not German; when they did Soviet Marxism, they did it—in East Germany—in a more Soviet way than the Soviets, the Stasi outclassed the KGB; and when they became post-national, they went further than anyone else in national self-abnegation—there are even groups called the Antideutsch, Germans who are thorough and logical in their desire to liquidate Germany and the Germans. The English could never take it all quite so seriously.

Jung on the migrant crisis: enantiodromia, the repressed psychic factor turns into its opposite. What is most repressed in Germany? Anti-semitism, of course—that is completely verboten. What is repressed will return and this is why Germany threw her borders open to migrants. She threw her borders open to make up for the holocaust of the Jews; to do the opposite of the extermination camps, save undocumented outsiders and not oven them. Yet the people she chose to save, mostly Muslims, despise the Jews.

The refugees and their children will ignore and scorn anti-Holocaust lessons in German schools; why should they feel guilty for what Germans did? They will resent the imposition of guilt, especially when their relatives in Syria die under Israeli bombs—bombs partially paid for by the Germans. The migrants will be resistant to the post-war guilt ideology that most Germans follow. And so the most repressed element of the German psyche, anti-semitism, has re-expressed itself in an act that is supposed to make reparation for the extermination camps; and so the Germans can, through their “new Germans”, be anti-semites again—just as their unconscious wished. The opposites have reversed, the repressed has returned.