“Cuckoo Clock Safari” - that´s how the wording on the destination display in the front window of a coach touring East Germany´s rural Iron Bedrock Mountains region could be translated. But inside the vehicle were not forestry students researching the multi-generational aftermath of mining-induced clear-cut and monoculture during the urban expansion in the early industrialisation. And lined up in the streets were not local vendors of folklore and ethno-food intent to catch some of the spending capacity dropping off the metropolitan administration´s desks. No no. Inside the bus were war refugees following Merkel´s “welcome policy,” and outside of the bus were local villagers protesting whatever of the chancellor they want to resign would come into their reach. Stuck in between the claws of this proxy conflict were security forces uttering just as helpless apologetics for their imbecile performance as Merkel in her latest press briefings.
The footage became viral on the internet because it was self-evident to instructors across all language barriers: As the alpha player of the situation, how would you handle it in different varieties? How would you handle a besieged bus full of politicians evacuated over a terrorism suspicion? How one full of convicted murderers? One full of excited team sports fans? One full of foreign spending capacity? Would the anti-hostage-taking unit be helicoptered in? Would it address the inmates of the vehicle as free people or as prisoners?
Would they have the right to elect a co-driver negotiating demands for the whole group? Would the officer tell them to stay calm until the reinforcement arrives, or would he be yelling shut up or else? Would the police psychologist blow the whistle when demands to be made to the driver before they can be requested from the co-driver are being enforced in blind rage against individual passengers? Would this be the point where the viewer complains against debating distant possibilities rather than the actual situation that was?
The fact that the Clausnitz Coach Siege was a proxy conflict over the lack of political legitimacy in Berlin´s current regime expresses itself first and foremost in the experience of the refugees who said they wanted to go wherever they are welcome and just regard the defunct assignment as erroneous. Then it expresses itself in the incapability of the government forces to admit a mistake. And it expresses itself in the evident conclusion from the destination display: If the community is dependent on a trickle-in economy from other parts of the nation and even beyond then it is self-evident that it may disagree with the national majority consensus.
The political economy of historical materialism further suggests that lands affected by deforestation have no further economic attraction left, making relative depression in comparison to the whole of the economy more likely than not. In other words, for an outsider there is no side to take since as in all proxy conflicts the anticipation of interests possibly projected upon them exceeds the limits of their actual interests. And since Merkel and her totalitarian rule is the subject matter of the conflict, the state under her leadership by definition cannot be neutral.
It did not even try. It tried to appease one side by abusing the other, a move so stupid that it fired back to the extent of turning the incident into a prototype situation. And Merkel´s police know that they are morally wrong, as otherwise they would not have reached for the lame excuse they were punishing a person for the purpose to guarantee its security. If that would have been the case then they would have worked in a completely different way. What sticks upon Merkel is the conclusion that her officials promoted a lie although they knew that it could not stand, because that is the role model Merkel gave to them when she announced her so-called “welcome policy.”
There are obvious reasons why Merkel welcomes war refugees. Awash of trade surplus fired up by cheap oil, the German economy profits from the Arab-American trade war. That also makes up for a steeper difference between manufacturing and trickle-in sectors. Expanding industrialists want some of the refugees to fill surplus positions with professionals they cannot squeeze out of the population in the trickle-in regions. Yet the immigration bureaucracy distributes them equally over the area, unlike the money.
Hence, trickle-in areas already dependent on tourism do not only get to bear a burden that is not compensated by an according benefit, but also a risk of losing existing customers on complaint. For them, incoming refugees are the messengers of the bad news that the government sucks. Yet some of these complaining are governors of trade surplus collecting regions, with the delicate aspect that a significant share thereof comes from the arms sold into the massacres the refugees are trying to escape. And the Merkel government said that it did not recognise surplus arms trade with oil oligarchs as a problem of sufficient importance to overrule its predecessors.
When that conflict reached its first climax in the Heidenau Shopping Mall incident last summer, indicating that her security apparatuses´ penetration of the entire spectrum of opposition had collapsed into a nationalist blowback drawing up a grotesque caricature of the domestic “social engineering” efforts by means of the refugees´ tears, Merkel hastily announced her “welcome policy,” desperately trying to market herself as a purported beacon of sanity in an allegedly inexplicable frenzy. The crisis escalated with a series of proposals all tailored to bypass administrative failures instead of fixing them, and to deter applicants instead of formally declining their requests.
Instead of making room for a true welcome policy that would sooner or later rise out of elections, Merkel chose to come up with a phoney one driven by economic blackmail. Her government turned the war refugees into a political play-ball for its efforts to stifle all alternatives to replace it with a honest one not leaning upon the woes of trickle-in regions, and has the refugees bear the consequences of its own spoiling of a frank debate. Now, to the great satisfaction of the opposition, that corrupted approach is coming back to bite Merkel in the neck. The house of cards she has been playing against dissidents literally went up in flames.
Merkel´s approach is built upon a bureaucratic momentum to distribute the war refugees with destination Germany all over Europe, just like it is already happening inside Germany with the above described effects. Hence her incapability to catch up the escalation with reforms. Her “welcome policy” attempts to speak in the name of these it does not represent. Yet most war refugees have chosen Germany as their destination of exile or emigration because it is here where the war that infringed upon their lives has originated.
One prominent politician in Merkel´s cabinet has compared the refugee surge to an avalanche triggered without intent, and subsequently was immediately criticised by others for likening human beings to a brute force of Nature such as a flood, a torrential rainfall or an avalanche (possibly next: to a lack of drinkable water caused by either). Both sides could hardly have come further off the mark: That surge is entirely intended, resulting out of the human ambition to end the war and forever remove its cause.