Germany's Hara-Kiri

German, Canadian, and even our own leaders seem intent on our self-destruction and the victory of China and Russia

Photo Credit- Museum of New Zealand

For hundreds of years, defeated or condemned Samurai warriors and feudal lords would often be compelled to commit seppuku, more commonly known as hara-kiri, to avoid capture by their enemies or restore their honor from a disgrace.  This excruciatingly painful process first involved thrusting a knife deep into the abdomen, followed by a grisly slice across the belly, and ultimately culminating in the Samurai’s beheading by a Kaishakunin as an act of mercy.  While thankfully the Japanese have long stopped performing this violent ritual, many outside Japan, myself included have long been fascinated with it and use the words seppuku and hara-kiri as a euphemism for any self-destructive act.   Today, the policies enacted by Western governments, both culturally and economically, I will describe as no less dramatically self-destructive than a Samurai committing hara-kiri.  Perhaps the best case in point is Germany.

On Monday, January 15, as my home in Tennessee was being blanketed by 9 inches of snow, more than 30,000 angry German farmers and their tractors created a blockade in the center of Berlin to protest the planned phase-out of subsidized diesel fuel.  Finance Minister (equivalent of the Secretary of the Treasury) Christian Linder attempted to assuage the crowd only to be heckled off the stage.  The farmers’ protests have been the culmination of months of strikes across the country by rail workers, plumbers, and even Amazon delivery drivers all in opposition to the German economy’s slow decline and the German government’s habit of accelerating this decline.  For a country that once prided itself as the #1 economic power of Europe with ambitions to rival the United States in the global economy, the fall has been swift (not Taylor) and stunning.

            The main fault for Germany’s decline has been its erroneous energy policy.  For decades, German politicians gambled that Russia, through its Nord Stream pipeline, would be a reliable supplier of natural gas who would refrain from weaponizing its exports for political ends.  At the same time, German politicians sought to rapidly transition the German economy towards complete independence from fossil fuels, with cheap natural gas from Russia being a bridge from the traditional reliance on coal and nuclear power to a utopia of wind and solar power.  The German government was even so bold as to greenlight a second Nord Stream pipeline from Russia to Germany despite all the red flags of Russian misbehavior.  Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin was quietly preparing to literally blow up German assumptions about Russian intentions. 

            Enter the German Green Party (Die Gruenen).  Following a surge in support in the 2021 national election from young voters concerned about climate change, this left-wing progressive political party agreed, with two more established political parties, to form a three-way coalition government, dubbed the most progressive in German history.  After only three months in power, Russia invaded Ukraine.  Suddenly, Germany’s energy supply was no longer safe.  Putin had actually planned to shut off the supply the very day of the invasion, only for his plans to be thwarted by two anonymous Russian officials.  However, even when Putin did ultimately carry out his threat to ax German energy supplies as revenge for Germany’s support for Ukraine, the Green Party was determined as ever to make the energy problem worse. 

Since the 2011 Fukushima plant meltdown, Germany had committed by law to closing its entire fleet of nuclear power plants by 2023.   And close them Germany did.  Despite pleas from some politicians to rewrite the law and keep open the plants, Green ministers warned the other two parties that should Germany’s nuclear power plants remain open past April 2023, they would promptly withdraw from the coalition and collapse the government.  After all, ideology must come first over economic rationality- even if it means increased production of coal, a power source much dirtier than nuclear.  The result has been that energy prices in Germany are now triple what they were five years ago, and German companies are forced to close factories. The Green Party’s goal of drastically cutting carbon emissions has thus succeeded, but at a grim price.  Germany’s economic hara-kiri is now in full swing.

            According to a German friend, energy policy is not the only self-destructive idea pushed by Green politicians.  Rather than fix Germany’s economic problems, Green politicians seem more focused on making the German language more “gender neutral” by adding unpronounceable "gender stars" (gendersternchen) to words and giving a green light for German citizens to change their gender without the approval of a judge or licensed psychologist.  Also, the German Greens happen to forget that the auto manufacturing industry is the backbone of the German economy.  On top of the challenges with electricity and gas prices, German car manufacturers now must cease the production of combustion engines by 2030.  These policies will make any reasonable person scratch their head, owing to their complete detachment from reality.  Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping probably can’t help but laughing at this German hara-kiri.

            Of course, the Germans are not alone in these acts of lunacy.  Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been working overtime to one-up the German Greens in the field of virtue signaling.  Last month, the Canadian Ministry of Employment and Social Development released new regulations mandating that menstrual products be available in not only ladies’ restrooms, but men’s restrooms as well.  I must have been unaware of this biological miracle, since apparently men can now complete the menstrual process too.  This sort of moral posturing that only “benefits” a microscopic slice of the Canadian population is exactly the policy that Canadians have come to expect from Trudeau.  These plans include mandated racial and gender quotas, a growing alphabet of gender categories, and finally controversial carbon tax and cap-and-trade schemes that risk crippling Canada’s vast oil industry, home to the world’s fourth largest proven reserves. The last one will dramatically increase costs for Canadians already struggling with a housing crisis.  For Trudeau, the goal seems to be not only following the German hara-kiri, but also making it even more painful.

Of course, while less drastic than in Germany, let alone Canada, the United States also has a concerning recent history of hara-kiri virtue signaling that must certainly amuse our greatest international rivals, China and Russia.  In 2022, voters from the state of Pennsylvania elected to the United States Senate John Fetterman, a man only partially recovered from a stroke who frequently wears a hoodie and gym shorts on the Senate floor.  While the Fetterman case is more of a tragedy for himself than the entire country, the state of California has stood out in its self-destructive behavior.  While for now still the largest of the 50 state economies, California has done its best to drive business out of the state as it continues to accelerate its hyper-progressive virtue signaling.  Perhaps most damaging of all is the ongoing hara-kiri of the US military.  Rather than place international and domestic security at the forefront of its mission, the Pentagon is wasting more than $100 million per year on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs that have been reputed to shame white individuals for historical wrongs against minorities inflicted by individuals long deceased.  No wonder that recruitment for the US military is currently at an all-time low. 

In contrast to these self-inflicted hara-kiri policies being directed from Berlin, Ottawa, and Washington, our main rivals, China and Russia are implementing worrying strategic plans that will certainly put the West at an incredible disadvantage.  While I want to make clear that I have no reservations about clean energy, I do have reservations about the unequal burden forced upon Western countries to reduce fossil fuel consumption while China, Russia, and India alone account for nearly half of the world’s carbon emissions.  Furthermore, rather than focus on philosophical experimentation in the military and driving recruits away, China (now the leading customer of Germany’s lost Russian gas) and Russia are both doubling down on militarizing their entire societies and putting the military in control of the economy as well as implementing “patriotic” education curricula.  It seems unlikely that either China or Russia will follow Western countries by legislating the minutiae of gender ideology or the sabotage of their own industrial base.

In conclusion, I absolutely believe that we in the west can still find a happy medium between the Chinese and Russian models of chauvinist nationalism and aggressive militarism and the Western models of cultural and economic hara-kiri.  After all, the current progressive administrations in Germany, Canada, and the United States have all hemorrhaged their approval ratings and are likely to be ousted in the next elections.  Still, the fact that we are so committed to committing hara-kiri, except without the honor, is quite troubling not only to me, but to millions of Germans, Canadians, and Americans.  If we continue down this road, the only winners will be China and Russia.