Germany Has Green Bombed Itself Backward in Time in A Perfect Example of the Suicide of the West

Victor David Hanson is a national treasure. He has just written an article for The Daily Signal about the deindustrialization of Germany that resulted from, among other things, that nation’s foolish Energiewende.

Hanson points out that U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau had developed a plan during World War II to prevent Germany from ever making war again once it was defeated by the Allies.

The plan would have ensured that within six months of Germany’s surrender, all of its industrial plants and equipment were to be dismantled.

Fortunately, for both Germans and the West, that plan was rejected in favor of the famous Marshall Plan, which worked economic miracles. But, several decades later Germany went politically correct and decided it needed to go free. The Energiewende was launched, and now Germany is stuck with extraordinarily high electricity prices that are destroying the German economy:

Currently, Germany is doing to itself almost everything Morgenthau once dreamed of.

Its green delusions have shut down far too many of its nuclear, coal, and gas electrical generation plants.

Erratic solar and wind “sustainable energy” means that power costs are four times higher than on average in the United States.

Once-dominant European giants Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes are now bleeding customers and profits. Their own government’s green and electric vehicle mandates ensure they will become globally uncompetitive.

The German economy actually shrank in 2023. And the diminished Ruhr can no longer save the German economy from its own utopian politicians.

The German military is all but disarmed and short thousands of recruits.

German industries do not produce enough ammunition, tanks, ships, and aircraft to equip even its diminished army, navy, and air force.

Just a few hundred miles from Germany in Ukraine, more than a million Ukrainians and Russians are dead, wounded, or missing—in the costliest European battle since the horrors of Stalingrad.

Yet, the once postwar German dynamo nation now lacks the manpower, munitions, and money to aid Ukraine in any meaningful way against an ascendant Russian invader.

More than 1 million immigrants have entered the country illegally, the vast majority of them from the Middle East. Many of them are hostile to European values and culture, as recent terrorist killings have shown. One-fifth of the population was not born in Germany.

The shrinking German people are growing angry, divided, and depressed. Their 1.4% fertility rate is one of the lowest in the Western world.

A tragic irony now abounds.

After World War II, the Truman administration rejected the notion of a pastoral, deindustrialized, and insecure Germany as a cruel prescription for poverty, hunger, and depopulation.

But now the German people themselves voted for their own updated version of Morgenthau’s plan—as they willingly reduced factory hours, curtailed power and fuel supplies, and struggled with millions of illegal aliens and porous borders.

There’s much more to Hanson’s analysis, and it should be read in full. The Energiewende, as so many of us predicted during the early years of its implementation has been an unmitigated disaster. The key mover was Angela Merkel, of course, which is significant for three reasons. First, she was a PhD chemist by training, a scientist extremely vulnerable to the fatal conceit, the false notion that intelligence in one thing is expertise in all things. Secondly, she had no children and, therefore, lacked the humility children impose on all parents. Thirdly, she came from what was East Germany and grew in a culture of top-down government control of everything.

Merkel’s conceit, lack of humility, and belief in government control of all things caused her to impose the Energiewende on the German people. It has now produced what can only be described as degeneration. Two decades ago, it would be impossible to imagine Germany deindustrializing and experiencing economic decline. It was the European powerhouse and unchallenged in that respect. Then, it wrote off fracking and nuclear and decided to pursue solar, wind, and EVs. It effectively green-bombed itself backward. The lesson for the rest of us is clear.

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