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The Mark Steyn Cruise is at La Coruña on the Galician coast today. Nevertheless, the occasional news story from the wider world has penetrated our splendid seaborne isolation.
~This, for example, is an interesting development. From the Reinickendorf district of Berlin:
Mann stürmt mit Machete in Bäckerei – und wird mit Baseballschlägern totgeprügelt
Which means:
Man storms into bakery with machete - and is beaten to death with baseball bats
Who takes a baseball bat to a bakery? Well, as usual, the local media coverage is minimal and designed to obfuscate. The 38-year-old deceased had apparently been living in a homeless shelter and was a regular of the baker's who believed him to be Romanian. He entered the shop on the Residenzstraße bearing the increasingly popular Euro-accessory of a machete, and commenced attacking a quintet of roofers aged from early twenties to late fifties who had just procured their rolls and coffees. The customers fought back with chairs, and, when their attacker fled, took off in hot pursuit. They caught up with him outside a nearby school, got him to the ground, and clubbed him to death. All five were arrested at the scene.
I can sympathise with the chaps. I don't go to Germany terribly often, and it has been a while since I have been to Berlin. But I was in the deep south and far north of the country not so long ago, and at either end the first thing I do of a morning is stroll to a favourite bakery and take a coffee with the accompanying glass of water at a sidewalk table. It would be immensely irritating to have one's start to the day interrupted by the usual machete-wielding nutter and I can well understand the urge to beat him to a pulp. The normalisation of phrases such as "Macheten-Mann" does not speak well for any polity.
So certain things can be said with reasonable confidence. There will be more machetes in Germany's future, more "Macheten-Männer", and more violence, lots more. The only question is whether one side retains its monopoly of violence - as in, say, the recent Munich "car attack" - or whether it is met with reciprocal violence at the point of contact. I would bet on the latter: it is asking a lot to expect any people, even in a flailing low-trust society, just to offer themselves up to the day's stabbing. So there is a certain powerful symbolism to the thwarted stabber's bloody end.
German politics likewise makes more violence inevitable. It is only six weeks since the election and the "winner", the "centre-right" Fred Mertz, has yet to take office. But seventy per cent of voters say they do not trust him, and his party is down five per cent. On the very day the terms of the new coalition were announced, the "far right" topped the polls in Germany for the first time since ...well, you know who. The AfD is now on twenty-five per cent, which wouldn't be a lot in a two-party system like America's, but on the other hand the party that made all the running in Mertz's "negotiations" (ie, betrayal of his voters) was the leftie SPD, which got only sixteen per cent of the vote - its worst result since the 1893 election under Kaiser Bill. Yet this dead husk of a party will be calling all the shots in the new government. Whatever the problem with Germany, it is not a surfeit of democracy.
Across Western Europe, we are watching great nations die before our eyes. The anti-populist "firewall" is very thorough: it extends to banning AfD members from playing on the parliamentary footie team. But it cannot hold - and, in Bundestags as in bakeries, it makes more violence inevitable.
~In this eighth year of The Mark Steyn Club, we're very appreciative of all those who signed up in our first flush and are still eager to be here as we cruise on towards our first decade. We thank you all. For more information on the Club, see here.