I have been reading the wonderful, and last, book of the late Philip Kerr, called Metropolis. Kerr died untimely at age 62 in 2018. Metropolis is set in Berlin, in 1928. The Nazis and the Commies are engaged in street fighting. The political order is delicate. The government can barely summon a majority of centrist parties. Jews, many of whom are in senior positions in government, carry pistols for self protection. Jew hatred is rife; it has become socially normal in broad sections of the public. In Berlin, homosexuality both male and female is broadly tolerated and almost normal. The nightclubs offer British and other foreign visitors the same kind of sex tourism we have heard about in Thailand. Veterans in tattered uniforms without legs or arms beg in the street. Gangs of young thugs prowl the city looking for people to beat or rob. The police are barely able to keep a lid on the chaos.
Into this mess steps the young Bernie Gunther, newly appointed to the murder section of the Kripo, the criminal police. Bernie is a veteran of the trenches, and has a drinking problem. He lives in a boarding house. He is a widower. A man is killing and scalping young whores, and leaving behind false clues that take up police time in wild goose chases. Another killer is putting bullets into the heads of veterans begging on the streets, and sending taunting letters to the police department mocking their inability to catch him.
Many scenes are set in various night clubs where, if the shows are not sexual they involve cruelty and degradation of the performers or of the audience. As I read one particularly horrid passage, where the talentless were humiliated before a howling audience, I thought of the idea of a stand up comedian telling the audience, in 1928, just for laughs, what would happen to Berlin and Germany in the next thirty years. I wonder if such a comedian could make it sound funny. I bet you he could carry it off for a while.
- within the next 5 years, Hitler would bring the Nazis to power (scattered boos, plenty of applause)
- The night clubs of Berlin would be shut down immediately after the Nazi take-over (much booing, scattered applause)
- Germany would absorb Austria, repudiate the Versailles treaty and re-arm (more applause)
- Jews would be publicly humiliated, their wealth ripped off by the Nazi state, and they would be disbarred from public office (mixed applause, nervous laughter)
- The Sudetenland would be absorbed into Germany, and Czechoslovakia would be dismembered (more applause)
- The British and French reaction to the rearmament and these events would be supine passivity (wild applause)
- Hitler and Stalin would make a non-aggression pact, as Great Britain dithered too long in its dealings with Stalin (scattered shouts of disbelief) leaving Hitler a free hand in the East (strong applause)
- In 1939, only eleven years into the future, Poland would be invaded and crushed in weeks, while 240 French divisions do nothing on the German border. Some French troops march ten miles into Germany and then march out again. (cries in incredulity, scattered applause)
- In 1940, Germany invades France through the Ardennes and conquers France in six weeks using a combination of tank and airpower to achieve paralysis of the French ability to combat the Germans effectively. (wild applause)
- The English manage to get out of France by a massive sea lift from Dunkirk, leaving their equipment behind. (cheers, boos)
- The German air force fails to suppress the British air force, and gradually calls off major air operations over England by 1941 (boos)
- Winston Churchill is made British Prime Minister, and offers his people nothing but “blood, toil, tears and sweat”. (more booing)
- Hitler invades the USSR in 1941 and nearly reaches Moscow. The Soviets reel and fall back, but do not give up. German casualties approach 1.5 million dead. (silence, some booing)
- Having engaged Germany in a two front war, Hitler declares war on the United States after the Japanese neutralize the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, in December 1941. (Stunned silence)
- Hitler launches an attack into the Caucasus, and sets the Sixth Army into Stalingrad on the Volga. In late 1942 the Sixth Army is surrounded and forced to surrender, with 600,000 prime German troops marched into captivity, from which maybe 15,000 would ever survive. (Boos, calls of “traitor”, and moves to get the comedian off the stage)
- North Africa, Sicily, southern Italy reclaimed by the Allies in 1943. (more booing, hoots of derision)
- Decisive defeat of the Germans at the battle of Kursk in 1943 (throwing of objects at the comedian)
- Mass slaughter of Jews and Poles continues in captured Polish territory from 1942 onward. (silence)
- Allies land in France in 1944 at the same time as German Army Group Centre collapses in Byelorussia in a military catastrophe so large it still does not have a place name assigned to it.
- Russians conquer Berlin by May 1945 (gasps of horror, boos, calls to get the damn fool off the stage)
- Communism imposed on eastern Germany, parliamentary government in the west by late 1940s (boos).
- Europe divided between communist east and capitalist west until 1989, when Russia throws in the towel and European Communism disappears as an effective force (the few communists in the audience boo, the rest give tepid applause)
- Germany re-unites as a federated democratic republic. (tepid cheers, scattered boos)
At this point the Nazi sympathizers in the audience haul the comedian off the stage and beat him. Communists join in.
The point of this recitation of facts is that it would have been completely incredible to the louche and worldly audience in a Berlin nightclub in 1928, even as the chaos of Berlin was immediately before their eyes.
And I think that equivalent, and equally incredible, things are happening in western society today. The undermining of the host society by the termite forces of leftism is now revealing itself everywhere: abolition of the past, hatred for one’s own culture, anti-white racism, banning and exclusion of any thought that contradicts the Black Lives Matter narrative, total corruption of universities, firings, shamings, Maoist insurrections, the long horrid consequences of Jacques Derrida and the French nonsense machine, third rate Nietzscheans all. Prof. Gad Saad speaks of idea pathogens.
Where will it end? Either in revolution or in counter-revolution.
When will it come? The revolution is underway already.
The counter-revolution is not far behind.
Only those with impoverished imaginations fail to see it coming.
As Orwell said, sometimes it takes all our powers to see what is before our eyes.